Company:Stellar Cyber

Stellar Cyber

Type	Privately Held
Industry	Information Security
Founded	2015 (2015) (incorporated)
Founder	Aimei Wei, VP Engineering
Headquarters	Santa Clara, California , U.S.
Area served	North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and LATAM
Key people	Changming Liu, (CEO) John Peterson (CPO)
Products	Unified Security Analytics Platform
Website	www.stellarcyber.ai

Stellar Cyber is an American cyber security software company, headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company was founded in 2015 under the name Accaella Technology, renamed to Aella Data and subsequently named Stellar Cyber. The company provides breach detection software, known as a Unified Security Analytics Platform to medium and large enterprise companies and managed security service providers.

History

Stellar Cyber was founded in 2015 by Chinese-American Aimei Wei, a former software engineer with Cisco Systems. During the founding of the company, a prototype to accelerate packet processing was created, which lead to building a fast meta-data extraction and enrichment processor. The original use case for this packet processor was to collect network data in order to perform advanced network, application and security analytics.

In January 2017, the company presented its technology to Feng Deng, founder of Northern Light Venture Capital and prior co-founder of NetScreen Technologies. Feng Deng, impressed by the prototype, decided to participate in a round of funding from Northern Light Venture Capital's US fund. The company used this funding to build its engineering team and take the technology from prototype to product. After 6 months of software development the company had a scalable network data collector that extracted metadata and enriched the dataset with contextual information and a data lake built on top of a microservices architecture. Under an advisory capacity, Changming Liu, a Chinese-American technology executive and at the time, founder and CTO of Aerohive Networks and former software development manager of NetScreen Technologies, began to help the company prepare for productization and commercial launch.

In June of 2017 Changming reconnected with former Netscreen Technologies colleague and cyber security product executive John Peterson in an effort to recruit him to partner with him and Aimei to help the company in productizing the technology and build a strong market strategy. John, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps with an extensive background in helping build cyber security companies such as Netscreen Technologies, Fortinet, Websense, Juniper Networks, Barracuda Networks and Comodo Group joined forces with Aimei and Changming as Chief Product Officer and started helping to take the technology in a cyber security focused direction.

In October 2017 the company released its version 1.0 minimum viable product as a Breach Detection System while staying in stealth mode as it further garnered customer acceptance within the market. Customer acceptance came quickly with Stellar Cyber gaining its first two customers in December of 2017, just 1 year from the technology being a prototype.

In March 2018 Changming Liu resigned from his post as CTO of Aerohive Networks to become the CEO of Stellar Cyber and the company exited stealth mode at the 2018 RSA Conference in San Francisco, California with a handful of customers and innovative technology. The product was so well received that it was listed as one of the hottest cybersecurity products at RSA 2018 by CSO Online magazine.

In February 2019 the company announced that it had secured series A funding of $13.2M, with Valley Capital Partners leading the round, Northern Light Venture Capital continuing its participation and Frank Marshal of Big Basin Ventures. At this time the company changed its name from Aella Data to Stellar Cyber to convey more of a security focus as a company vs. data focus.

Products

Stellar Cyber's flagship product named Starlight, autonomously detects a broad range of threats in the entire cyber kill chain with high confidence throughout entire environments. Starlight uses artificial intelligence, including supervised learning, unsupervised machine learning, and deep learning techniques, to detect and respond to advanced cyberattacks. Remediation actions are taken with security information and event management (SIEMs), firewalls, endpoint security enforcement, network access control, and orchestration, which are integrated with Starlight via an application programming interface.