Ankur Singla: "You have to defend at machine speed, and humans need to just supervise what's going on"
"You have to defend at machine speed, and humans need to just supervise what's going on," Exaforce founder and CEO Ankur Singla told ISMG, summarizing the company's core premise. The San Francisco-based startup argues that autonomous, near-instant responses are required because the volume and velocity of enterprise telemetry outstrip what human operators can handle in real time.
How Exaforce says its real-time reasoning platform works
Exaforce, founded in 2023, says its platform continuously contextualizes and correlates incoming telemetry before users even ask questions. The company starts with what it calls a semantic security knowledge graph, then models how identities, APIs, applications and systems interact across enterprise environments. According to Singla, that pipeline lets the platform "reason on all the incoming data irrespective of volume and size" and do so "in real time."
Singla framed the approach around preventing bad decisions by AI agents: "The biggest problem for all the agentic systems is the data," he said. Exaforce's solution, he added, prioritizes high-quality, contextualized telemetry because "if you don't have enough data, no matter how much processing power I give you, you will make bad decisions."
Why Exaforce distinguishes itself from SIEM and AI SOC vendors
Singla emphasized two distinguishing points. First, he said traditional SIEMs and many newer AI-driven SOC products focus heavily on post-alert triage workflows. Exaforce, by contrast, continuously analyzes and reasons on data before alerts are generated. Second, the company positions continuous, real-time data enrichment and correlation as a necessary corrective to the limits of standard large language model context windows; rather than "querying raw data after the fact," Exaforce processes streams as they arrive.
Those capabilities are presented as tactical advantages for environments that have grown more heterogeneous: Singla noted customer demand expanding into operational technology (OT), IoT systems and enterprise applications such as Salesforce and Workday, and singled out manufacturing as an environment with "highly diverse endpoint and infrastructure ecosystems" that require new semantic and behavioral models.
Series B: $125 million to scale sales, partners and enterprise wins
Exaforce announced a $125 million Series B round intended to help the company expand sales, marketing and its partner ecosystem. The startup employs 94 people and has raised $200 million in outside funding to date, having last closed a Series A round in April 2025. Singla told ISMG that customers care about vendor capitalization when choosing long-term partners: "Customers want companies that are well capitalized, because they're making a big decision on who to partner with."
Operational priorities for the Series B, Singla said, are ensuring new commercial teams "become productive quickly" and measuring success by customer acquisition efficiency and "landing the right enterprise accounts." He framed the funding as a bet on a long-term transition toward systems that operate autonomously while humans supervise at a higher level.
What this means for CISOs, enterprise procurement, and manufacturers/OT operators
- CISOs and security professionals: Singla says they will gain a "limitless canvas" — the ability to build workflows, dashboards and applications through natural language interactions rather than being constrained by vendor-defined interfaces. They are also warned to prioritize contextualized, enriched data to avoid flawed automated decisions: "Agents depend on high quality data, and if you don't have that data... results will be poor," he said.
- Enterprise procurement and vendor teams: The Series B underscores that Exaforce expects purchase decisions to factor vendor capitalization and ecosystem reach. The company will judge its investment by customer acquisition efficiency and enterprise account wins, signaling that procurement teams can expect a push on partnerships and references.
- Manufacturers and OT operators: Singla highlighted manufacturing as a use case with nonstandard endpoints — OT and IoT devices alongside traditional IT — requiring new semantic and behavioral models. Those environments are flagged as places where continuous, real-time correlation and enrichment may be especially valuable.
Exaforce's assertions rest on a set of technical and commercial claims about real-time reasoning, continuous telemetry enrichment and a semantic security knowledge graph. The company's next steps, per Singla, are to translate the new capital into scalable go-to-market motion and to prove its approach at enterprise scale, judged by customer acquisition metrics and the ability to win "the right enterprise accounts."
Source: GovInfoSecurity — Exaforce Brings in $125M for Real-Time Cyber Reasoning
