SeedBlink Blog

Petrica Ruta is the CEO and Co-Founder of Siscale, an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) software company that leverages data, deep learning, and automation, helping cybersecurity experts to better address the present & future challenges of the industry.

Read on to discover interesting insights, including how Siscale was born, what is Arcanna.ai, and what are Petrica’s views about having a business presence in the USA.

How did Siscale come out and what is your role in it?

Each of Siscale’s founders has an extensive and diverse technical background in IT and cybersecurity. Collectively, we have tackled many real-world, IT and security operational challenges, and have been thinking that AI could help with these rampant problems. We created Siscale in the summer of 2019, to offer an opportunity to the smart engineers wanting to build AI applications with potential for great impact.

With passion and determination, our team built Arcanna.ai, a software platform that uses AI for enabling cognitive automation of complex processes, including decision-support.

My role as founder and CEO of the company has been dynamic and truly fulfilling. I am involved in all aspects of the company, from hiring, quality testing, and product management, to sales, managing customers, and pitching to investors.

In a nutshell, what does Siscale provide?

Today, the number of cyberattacks is growing exponentially while becoming increasingly sophisticated, even by employing AI. Companies find themselves overwhelmed by their growing shortage of internal cybersecurity resources such as time, skills, and knowledge. That is why it is a critical time for companies to leverage AI and automation for reducing the noise, the time spent on manual & repetitive tasks, or for building organizational knowledge bases, to level the battle field.

Siscale offers now Arcanna.ai Alert Triage, an AI solution that helps cybersecurity professionals with their challenges of triaging and investigating alerts, so they can focus on stopping and preventing the real, imminent attacks.

Tell us more about Arcanna.ai, your current flagship product. What exciting future developments do you have in store for us?

One of the biggest challenges that cybersecurity teams face is the avalanche of security alerts coming from their security detection systems. Businesses can experience tens to hundreds of thousands of alerts every day, with even higher numbers for larger companies. Alert triaging is therefore fundamental for keeping companies protected, yet almost every organization struggles to manage this efficiently.

Arcanna.ai is an automated cybersecurity alert triaging platform that marries AI, technology and human cognition and blends three key elements: deep learning, process automation, and user feedback.

Using a combination of customized deep learning models, our patented methodology, and user feedback, Arcanna.ai is capable to capture expert knowledge, encapsulating self-learning and adapting to the particularities of the ecosystem in which it runs. Essentially, it becomes a virtual assistant for cybersecurity teams that are overwhelmed by thousands of daily alerts and need to triage & investigate in order to identify the real threats.

Arcanna.ai can automate the decision process in triaging alerts, as well as post-decision manual tasks, such as ticket creation, notifying parties, threat intelligence collection, and remediation. This helps cybersecurity teams to streamline their operations, improving response time to incidents and reducing the risk of omitting important info due to alert fatigue.

At Siscale, we believe that any company can get a strategic advantage by using our platform to automate complex and overwhelming processes, so we plan to expand to other IT domains and industries. Our goal is to leverage AI applications, such as correlations, automated root cause analysis, or predictive analytics, thus assisting subject matter experts to use AI efficiently in daily operations, without the need to write a line of code.

Could you share interesting use cases where your cyber solutions have made an impact and met your clients’ needs across sectors?

Our vision of unlocking greater human potential using AI, has pushed us to explore the use of advanced technologies in cybersecurity. We have got the opportunity to develop a custom cybersecurity solution that leverages AI, and we are working together with Orange on leveraging Arcanna.ai, for offering more AI-enabled products to business customers.

What are your views about the USA market when it comes to cybersecurity innovation and potential for business?

As technology continues to grow, so does the attack surface available to cybercriminals. Furthermore, cyberattacks and the ensuing breaches are becoming more prevalent in more industries and domains. Throughout the world, countries and companies of all shapes and sizes are forced to address these problems.

The USA market, in particular, has often been a primary target for cyberattacks and has always felt the pain of cybersecurity talent shortages. They have recognized the need for innovation and, historically have always been early adopters of innovative cybersecurity solutions. The US market continues to increase its spending each year and many companies are looking for simple, easy to adopt and cost-effective solutions like Arcanna.ai, for their complex problems. We believe Siscale has a huge potential on the USA market.

How big is the market and who are the winners: those who develop a specialized product, or those who create a product with a general target?

The market is massive!

Gartner estimates that global security and risk management spending will exceed $150 billion this year, an increase of 12.4% since 2020. There are many well-known companies such as McAfee or IBM that have been around for a long time, providing mostly general but also some targeted cybersecurity solutions. While their offer is valuable, these companies can be slow to innovate or simply may not have the business strategy focus on developing newer, specialized products.

From our experience, customers and investors ask for products that target problem areas in cybersecurity, integrate well with existing infrastructure, and can be easily adopted. Our offer is Arcanna.ai, that uses AI and machine learning to automate and streamline the overwhelming tasks of triaging and investigating cyberattacks.

In a May 2021 article by Gartner, their Managing Research VP, Lawrence Pingree, said “Looking ahead, we’re seeing early market signals of growing automation and further adoption of machine learning technologies in support of AI security. To combat attacks, organizations will extend and standardize threat detection and response activities.” This is a great description of what Arcanna.ai does, so we hope Arcana.ai will come out as a winner in this market.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in cybersecurity?

One of the biggest challenges any company faces in cybersecurity is the increase complexity and sophistication of cyberattacks. The attack surface is ever-expanding, as are the used methods. Malicious actors are using technologies like AI to create and exploit more vulnerabilities, they can subsequently leverage.

This leads to another major challenge – talent. There is a growing shortage of talent having the needed knowledge to address these cybersecurity threats.

How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

Cybercrime is growing exponentially year after year and is affecting more businesses of all sizes. In 2020 – the year of COVID-19, many companies had to transition to a predominantly remote-access IT infrastructure and/or shift to the cloud, which provided hackers with even more technical vulnerabilities to exploit.

Businesses will have to spend more money on threat detection systems while still suffering from the lack of resources needed to triage the avalanche of alerts. Siscale is able to help companies in managing this encumbering process, with an easy to adopt, cost-effective solution.

Our AI-enabled solution evolves every day, and we see Siscale growing its ability to manage and automate complex cybersecurity processes, for companies of any size, in any industry, or any IT field.

How do you differentiate from other similar tools on the market?

Arcanna.ai differentiates in the way it collects and processes knowledge from experts using its deep learning model and how it applies this knowledge to automate the process of triaging & investigating alerts. Moreover, we know that our technology and methodology can (and will) be applied to other, AI-enabled IT areas.

There is a growing shortage of specialized personnel, especially in cybersecurity, which means companies struggle to address gaps in knowledge, skills, time and coverage. Furthermore, the cybersecurity field is demanding and high-stress; it’s not uncommon for analysts and specialists to change jobs, leaving their previous organization exposed.

Arcanna.ai has the capability to retain and apply the knowledge of experts on its platform, ensuring that, even if one of your analysts leaves or switches roles, their experience is still used when triaging security alerts.

More about Petrica Ruta | Siscale & Arcanna.ai | Their Seed funding round on SeedBlink

Did you find inspiration in these honest answers? If you like our approach, then become a member of an incredible tech community – join us HERE and let’s support together the innovators of the future!