Gabriel Tremblay and his team at Delve Labs have cashed in on a $1.5 million seed round from Real Ventures, Desjardins Innovatech and Quebecor.

The Montreal company created Warden, an autonomous, collaborative Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven, continuous vulnerability assessment software. It provides complete enterprise security coverage for large businesses.

When asked why Delve Labs felt it needed to raise the money, Tremblay was forthright: “I needed to!” he told MTLinTECH.

He said the business model they’re going after is based on raising venture capital. The startup previously raised a pre-seed round of $300,000 and plans to raise another round next year.

Tremblay, a former professional hacker, already hired a small sales team for a new office in Boston. All the IP and development work will remain at Delve Labs’ Montreal office.

Tremblay calls Delve Labs’ marquee product Warden an AI-based SmartVA (smart vulnerability assessment). Warden basically mimics security experts’ methods using deep learning techniques without human supervision. Delve Labs says it maximizes path coverage while intelligently eliminating false positives. Moreover, Warden continuously autodiscovers assets and runs Smart Vulnerability Assessments on them.

The large vulnerability dataset collected by Warden over time can easily be searched and categorized using modern cloud tech, giving specialists an efficient way to extract and correlate relevant information.

And finally, said Tremblay, it’s really easy to use.

“I think it’s one of our competitive advantages. We rely a lot on AI, so for lots of stuff that people usually need security experts for, it can be done by Warden with tech-aware people who don’t have to be experts,” said Tremblay.

Delve Labs’ target market is very large businesses. They’ve already signed up a few big Canadian banks, but Tremblay couldn’t reveal any names. They also work with smaller businesses through security software vendors and service providers who resell service bundles around Delve Labs’ technology.

Tremblay used to sell his services as a professional hacker, hired by big Canadian companies to find security vulnerabilities and solutions. These large companies already have their own security teams but still work with security experts for certification purposes.

“There’s already a lot of security products on the market, but despite that, most large businesses can’t cover more than about 20 per cent of their assets in terms of vulnerability assessment. Usually they require a lot of security expertise, and we built Warden for that specific problem,” said Tremblay.

Tremblay also runs NorthSec, the largest on-site security conference in the world held in Montreal for five years now. Professionals from around the world come every year along with 600 spectators and Tremblay runs the conference with about 30 volunteers.