Israeli start-up Shield-IoT, a specialist in mass-scale IoT and IIoT network cyber security and operational monitoring, has closed a $7.4m series A funding round.

Founded in 2017, Shield-IoT addresses the escalating proliferation of IoT cyber threats to devices, data, critical services and infrastructure. With Shield-IoT, service providers and IoT brands can monitor and secure their mass-scale B2B IoT and IIoT networks, reduce operational costs, and generate revenue streams with value-added services.

In use across multiple verticals including telcos, utilities, transportation, manufacturing, smart cities and government, Shield-IoT offers simple-to-deploy and easy-to-operate cloud-based software to protect any IoT device or application with no changes to end-customer networks.

Based on over 15 years of academic research and 50 academic papers, the firm’s coreset-AI patented technology changes IoT mass-volume data analysis through a transformation of big data into small datasets.

“Coresets compress the data from n to log(n), or from one million to twenty data points, enabling context-free highly accurate anomaly detection in minutes instead of hours or days,” said Dan Feldman, chief scientist at Shield-IoT.

Udi Solomon, CEO, who co-founded Shield-IoT with CTO Ohad Levin, added: “Shield-IoT removes the big data barriers and opens the door to a $50bn IoT connectivity services market for 2025. Our innovative technology is helping global IoT players to move forward and accelerate IoT growth.”

The technology is based on academic research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Haifa University, and backed by over 35 academic papers and multiple patents, The philosophy behind the AI-based coresets is that running existing algorithms on the reduced dataset will probably give approximate results to running them on the original big data. This field-proven technique lets the data be reduced by an unprecedented order of magnitude from n to log(n). This is done not by designing a new algorithm for solving the problem, but rather by running the existing algorithms on the reduced dataset.

Unlike other compression techniques such as zip or MP4, the coreset is data reduction and not just compression of the input, in the sense that it is problem dependent. The coresets, optimised for detecting network anomalies, remove most of the noise and therefore are more effective and faster when executing the algorithms.

The series A round was led by NextLeap Ventures and Bloc Ventures, with the participation of Atlas Ventures, Akamai Technologies, Springtide Ventures, DiveDigital and Janvest Capital Partners.

“Shield-IoT’s innovative approach to anomaly detection enables Akamai to provide accurate analytics at mass-scale,” said Ramanath Mallikarjuna, chief strategist at Akamai Technologies. “Akamai is collaborating with Shield-IoT on innovations to enhance cyber security and operational monitoring for customers of Akamai’s IoT solutions.”