Healthcare-focused cybersecurity company Blackwell Security has secured $13 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst and Rally Ventures. 

The company, which is a co-creation from General Catalyst and Rally Ventures, also hired Geyer Jones as its first chief executive officer. Jones previously served as chief operating officer at healthcare IoT security company Cylera and chief strategy officer at RSA.   

The Michigan-based company works with partners like General Catalyst's Health Assurance Network and with health systems to test and create cyber threat detection and response solutions.

Blackwell's Managed Healthcare Extended Detection and Response (MHXDR) offering provides health systems and providers with tailor-made cybersecurity solutions according to the organization's needs, addressing each endpoint within a provider's network.

Blackwell president and Chief Operating Officer Jaclyn Miller sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss the funding, and highlighted what makes Blackwell's offering different from other cybersecurity companies on the market. 

"I think the current providers don't fully understand where PHI [personal health information] is and is not, and therefore threat detection is undermined," Miller said. 

"Without having that context of how healthcare operates, and where PHI exists, and then being able to determine if PHI is compromised or not during an investigation, is super important. It's not something that is natively out of the box in every detection-response solution."

There are also more domains within healthcare that are not typically provided by an MDR provider or other security service, she said, including the connective medical-device area and clinical-application space, which Blackwell does address.   

The need for tailor-made solutions that manage specific pain points within healthcare became apparent with the Change Healthcare attack.

"The Change Healthcare breach is similar to the COVID pandemic that we saw, where the entire industry knew that it was a threat and that we should do something about it, but had been kind of sitting back and not really taking that seriously until that happened. I think this is kind of a banner moment for the industry to highlight that this problem has been ongoing for a long time, and now we have to take it seriously, because it really is the next pandemic within healthcare," Miller said. 

The company, which launched as a GC hatch company, is taking advantage of the partnership it's built with General Catalyst to ensure its application fit well within the healthcare market and to address those pain points.

"[General Catalyst] provided a lot of practical advice on launching a business, but more importantly, the relationships that General Catalyst has built in and the trust that General Catalyst has built in the healthcare industry has helped us greatly," Miller said.  

"So, we've been able to accelerate the amount of feedback and testing time in getting our solution up, in terms of scope of what's valuable and what's not valuable, within the Health Insurance Program in the network that General Catalyst brings us to. That includes some pretty sizable names, and so we can bring best-in-class cybersecurity programs to any healthcare organization, regardless of size, in the U.S.," Miller said. 

The company will use the funds to expand its security operations and go-to-market team. 

"More importantly, we will build out our threat detection, response and automation capabilities in our MHXDR platform. So, customizing automated-response playbooks and leveraging AI a lot faster than some of our other competitors or other tools, and really taking a unique look across tools, which is where our domain is," Miller said. 

"We partner with a number of technology players in the market to integrate solutions that are already in place. Our goal is not to come into a new customer's environment and rip and replace the technology they have, but rather use it and leverage it, and then do more with it to provide the level of defense that they need."