Cybersecurity’s biggest paradox? The systems built to spot danger can’t spot when they’ve stopped working. That’s the daily grind for most SOC teams, endless noise, false positives, and broken rules nobody has time to fix. Then Rilevera showed up. Founded Oct 2024 by Ethan Smart & Andrew Ingalls, this NJ-based detection engineering platform just locked in a $3M seed round led solely by DataTribe Foundry. One round. One investor. One clear mission: make detection actually work.
Ethan Smart, Co-Founder & CEO, didn’t just read about these problems, he lived them. A security practitioner who’s solved complex challenges for Fortune 500, Smart co-founded appNovi in 2020, scaled it, and exited in Nov 2024. After years of patching broken detections, he decided to rebuild the system from the ground up. The kind of founder who doesn’t chase headlines, he builds tools that fix the ones already broken.
Across from him sits Co-Founder & CTO Andrew Ingalls, a machine learning engineer & 3x founder with 15+ yrs turning data into product gold. Based in Kansas City, Ingalls has the technical chops of a data scientist & the curiosity of an inventor. From founding Trifecta Ecosystems to leading ML at A Place for Mom, his work improved neural networks’ accuracy by 56% & conversions by 10%. Now, his adaptive models power Rilevera’s engine, automatically testing, validating, & tuning detection rules so teams stop firefighting and start leading.
DataTribe Foundry saw what the rest of the market missed. The Fulton, MD cyber foundry, home to hits like Dragos, Strider, & BlackCloak, invests in just a few startups each yr. Their $3M bet on Rilevera signals something bigger: this isn’t another “detection tool.” It’s the blueprint for formalizing detection engineering the same way DevOps formalized deployment. Partner Andy Hunn is already rolling up his sleeves to help turn precision into scale.
Rilevera’s platform already tracks 2,525 detection rules across customer environments with a 92% health score, improving 5% week-over-week. Its early client roster flexes real weight, a Fortune 100 financial giant, a top U.S. insurer, & a major crypto company, all proving what the industry’s quietly known: most detection rules don’t work as advertised. Rilevera shows exactly which ones do.
This $3M round isn’t a victory lap, it’s ignition. Rilevera’s scaling fast, expanding product development, AI-driven tuning, & integrations across Splunk, Sentinel, Sumo Logic, CrowdStrike, & AWS. In a world chasing threats, Rilevera’s giving enterprises something rarer, proof. Detection that fires when it counts.
