Empirical Raises $25M Series A for AI Threat Prediction

Chicago cybersecurity startup Empirical has raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Brightmind Partners. The financing brings the company’s total funding to $37 million and will support product development, hiring and customer expansion.

Founded in 2024 and based in Chicago, Empirical plans to use the capital to accelerate work on two flagship products, Foundation and Radiant. According to the company, Foundation is a global cybersecurity model that monitors more than 18,000 exploited CVEs to inform threat prediction.

Radiant is a predictive engine that analyzes an organization’s environment to surface threats most relevant to that organization. The company adds the models are designed to reduce background noise and produce evidence-based signals to help security teams detect and prioritize risks.

Investors in the round included Brightmind Partners, with participation from Costanoa Ventures, Hyde Park Angels and other backers.

Empirical was co-founded by Ed Bellis, Michael Roytman and Jay Jacobs. Bellis and Roytman previously co-founded Kenna Security, and Jacobs helped create the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS).

“[At Kenna] we helped pioneer the category of risk-based vulnerability management, but it became clear that defending against AI-driven threats and the growing volume of potential exploits would require a fundamentally new approach. Today, we finally have the technology to give security teams predictive capabilities that weren’t possible before, and we came together to build that future.” — Ed Bellis, CEO

The company is targeting security teams in technology, healthcare and financial services, and Empirical adds its models are enhanced by AI and adjusted to each customer’s environment to provide forecasting, evidence-based risk analysis and actionable intelligence for remediation.