The cybersecurity landscape is experiencing a fundamental shift as artificial intelligence transforms how organizations approach threat detection and response. At the forefront of this evolution is AirMDR, whose AI-native Managed Detection and Response (MDR) platform is addressing critical gaps in the security operations market, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses that have been historically underserved by traditional SOC solutions.
Kumar Saurabh, CEO and co-founder of AirMDR, brings over 25 years of experience in the detection and response space, having previously co-founded Sumo Logic and worked with Fortune 500 SOCs at companies like ArcSight and LogicHub. His vision for AirMDR centers on democratizing enterprise-grade security operations through AI Analysts that can autonomously triage 90-95% of security alerts, dramatically reducing costs while improving response times.
AirMDR has just closed a $15.5 million seed round that will fuel investment in research and development of the company�s flagship technology and increase the efficacy and expertise of AI Analysts. Use of capital includes scaling sales and marketing to bring the benefits of AI SOC to the enterprise, managed security services providers (MSSPs), and to SMB organizations � a sector that�s sharply underserved by current MDR offerings. The round was led by Race Capital with full participation from AirMDR�s earlier backers Foundation Capital and Storm Ventures.
In this exclusive VMblog Q&A, Saurabh discusses how AirMDR’s SOC as a Service model is revolutionizing the $5 billion MDR market, the role of AI in eliminating expensive playbook development, and why the combination of AI automation with human oversight represents the future of managed security services. With 50,000 companies in the US alone needing MDR solutions and the market growing at 23%+ CAGR, AirMDR’s approach to making Fortune 500-quality SOC accessible to every enterprise is reshaping how organizations think about cybersecurity operations.
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VMblog: What is SOC as a Service? Is it autonomous? And who do you compete with?
Kumar Saurabh: SOC as a Service (SOCaaS) is a cloud-delivered security operations center that provides 24/7 threat monitoring, detection, and response-without requiring organizations to build and staff their own SOC.
The first round of triage and investigation is done autonomously. 90-95% of the alerts do not need a human response, because the alerts are not malicious. The 5% of alerts that do need a response – first gets escalated to a 24×7 security team – which reviews the work of the AI Analyst (that does the autonomous triage) – and then escalates it to the customer.
This way the customer gets the best of both worlds – cost effectiveness and much faster response times, while having the confidence that everything that gets escalated to them has also undergone human review.
VMblog: How can AirMDR help SMBs improve their security posture in ways that other AI-enabled MDR claimants don’t?
Saurabh: Most SMBs lack the security expertise or staff to build an in-house SOC to detect and respond to threats. AirMDR absolutely fills this security gaps for them – within the week, they gain the benefit of having a 24×7 SOC.
VMblog: Similarly, what can AirMDR do for larger mid-sized companies and enterprises that their current security solutions don’t?
Saurabh: AirMDR’s AI Analyst can do alert triage and investigation for larger enterprises as well. It eliminates the need to build playbooks – which is expensive (roughly 5K per playbook). And, most larger companies need 100+ playbooks to get all the different kinds of alerts triaged. And, that does not even include the cost of the automation platform. A pretty substantial investment. AI Analysts can do all of that at 1/5th the cost.
VMblog: The SMB market has largely been unaddressed. How large an opportunity is it?
Saurabh: The SMB market has remained unaddressed so far, because getting excellent security operations was prohibitively expensive. AI Analyst fundamentally changes the cost/quality equation – it is much faster, cheaper and even better at alert triage compared to manual triage or even automated alert triage.
There are 50,000 companies in the US alone that would need a MDR solution. This market is currently about 5B in size and growing nicely (at 23%+ CAGR).
VMblog: How will this change the human-MDR interactions? For large enterprises? For SMBs? For MSSPs and MSPs?
Saurabh: One of the advantages of AI Analyst is that you can chat with it like you would do with a real human analyst that never sleeps – and is about 10x faster. Quality of service and response times that MDR customers are going to get will be dramatically better than it has been in the last several years.
VMblog: What are you hearing from customers? Can you share anything that’s been said?
Saurabh: Yes, of course.
Randy Potts, CISO, full-service loan servicing company RTR, stated: “AirMDR is amazing, in about a week they had recreated all of the alerts my team had created over almost 9 years. Their ability to dig through logs and identify what is important shows how automation and AI can be a game changer for us in security operations, monitoring, and threat hunting.”
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