One Funding Round, Two Sets of Coverage
How Voxus Secured Coverage for a Cybersecurity Series A Funding Round and Extension
Series A Funding… in Two Parts
SpecterOps is a cybersecurity solutions and services provider specializing in knowledge of adversary tradecraft to help clients detect and defend against sophisticated attackers. To accelerate the growth of a new product, they raised a $25M Series A funding round, then a few months later, an $8.5M funding extension to that round from a separate VC.
When pitching funding news, organizations usually get one shot with press. When the additional funding happened, and the new VC expressed the expectation of additional coverage, Voxus was challenged to deliver results… again. The team knew that re-pitching the exact same story twice wouldn’t be successful.
Two Different Announcements, Two Different Strategies
Voxus chose a different strategy for each announcement; broad outreach for the first funding announcement, and then targeted exclusive pitching to top-tier targets for the extension round. Support from the new VC’S PR agency and involvement of a prominent security investor made Voxus confident we could land an exclusive.
Persistence and Politeness
Broad outreach for the first Series A announcement went smoothly, with many local, security, and VC press interested in the news. This announcement was a bright spot in an otherwise slow quarter for VC funding.
Exclusive pitching for the Series A extension announcement required persistence, with several reporters at TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal and Vice interested but too busy to cover. Voxus built a list of security funding reporters at business outlets and worked through them one at a time. Eventually diligence paid off with a cybersecurity reporter for Axios.
Two Strong Sets of Coverage
Both rounds of outreach were successful. The initial Series A announcement received 14 pieces of coverage including detailed articles in VentureBeat, Security Week, Puget Sound Business Journal, and more.
The extension round added another 12 pieces of coverage, including a detailed exclusive in Axios. Dark Reading also covered the extension, a personal goal for the SpecterOps CEO, and the news was included in funding newsletters from Fortune and Axios. Coverage spanned all the desired categories, from security to local to VC/funding. All this added up to a lot of buzz for SpecterOps with 26 total pieces of coverage.
SpecterOps is a cybersecurity solutions and services provider specializing in deep knowledge of adversary tradecraft to help clients detect and defend against sophisticated attackers. The company releases numerous widely used free and open-source security toolsets, including BloodHound, a penetration testing solution which maps attack paths in Active Directory and Azure environments.