Prelude Security has announced a fresh $16 million investment led by Brightmind Partners, with continued backing from Sequoia Capital and Insight Partners. This latest round raises the company’s total funding to $45 million and will accelerate commercialization of its runtime memory protection technology and broaden customer deployment. The approach is designed to stop malicious code the moment it executes, giving security teams a sharper edge against sophisticated, in-memory cyberattacks that traditional endpoint tools often miss.
The timing is critical. Roughly 75% of advanced cyberattacks now operate exclusively in memory, sidestepping file-based detection and behavior analytics. Prelude’s platform addresses this by tapping into hardware-level telemetry to detect and halt out-of-context code execution in user mode. This capability dovetails with Microsoft’s Windows Resiliency Initiative, which emphasizes resilience against memory-resident threats. CEO Spencer Thompson underscored that attackers must execute code to succeed, and Prelude is intercepting precisely at that inflection point—closing the gap left by conventional Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools.
Existing Prelude products already validate the coverage and configuration of EDR and antivirus solutions, bolstering resilience against commodity malware. Building on that foundation, runtime memory protection creates a new defensive layer that neutralizes advanced tactics such as process injection and “living-off-the-land” techniques. By doing so, Prelude aims to drastically reduce dwell time for ransomware operators and human adversaries.
For investors, the significance lies in what Stephen Ward of Brightmind Partners called “an architectural leap in endpoint security.” He stressed that this is not incremental progress but a rethinking of endpoint defense built to confront the realities of modern adversaries. Sequoia’s Bill Coughran echoed this view, framing Prelude’s work as the beginning of a “third wave” in endpoint protection—after antivirus and EDR—driven by AI advancements and a shift away from signature-based security models. With adversaries increasingly wielding AI themselves, Prelude’s strategy is positioned as a timely countermeasure in the escalating cybersecurity arms race.
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