Andesite Secured $23M To Handle The SOC Crisis With AI-driven Cybersecurity.

Cybersecurity is in a crisis, and it’s not just threats anymore it’s also about people today. Security analysts—those tasked with detecting and stopping cyberattacks—are burning out. SOCs (Security Operations Centers) have turned into pressure cookers of stress, overwhelmed with never-ending alerts, fragmented tools, and a talent shortage that’s bleeding the industry dry. The result? A security ecosystem that’s struggling to keep up, even as cyber threats grow more sophisticated.

Andesite AI believes it has a solution. The Virginia-based cybersecurity startup has secured an additional $23 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Red Cell Partners, bringing its total to $38.5 million. The investment will accelerate the development of Andesite’s AI-driven security operations center platform, one designed to augment, rather than replace, human analysts.

Security Analysts Are Drowning

SOC analysts today don’t just face cyber threats they also face an overwhelming amount of data. Thousands of alerts flood their dashboards daily. Each must be assessed, prioritized, and responded to, often across a tangled mess of security tools that rarely work well together.

“Andesite was founded to directly address a market need—automation in the SOC has failed,” the company told TFN. “Security analysts today are forced to toggle between applications, drowning in threat intel feeds and alerts while trying to navigate more than 100 different security tools. This fragmentation has led to widespread analyst burnout and operational inefficiency, with valuable team members spending most of their time on menial tasks instead of meaningful threat hunting.”

The problem isn’t a lack of cybersecurity investment. Global spending on security tools has risen in recent years. Yet SOCs remain reactionary rather than proactive. They chase alerts instead of hunting threats. And AI, despite all the hype, has yet to live up to its promise in security operations.

Andesite’s leadership team, which includes former CIA covert ops and information security officials Brian Carbaugh and William MacMillan, as well as former national cyber director Chris Inglis, argues that most AI solutions in cybersecurity fail because they attempt to replace human expertise rather than enhance it.

“Security analysts are irreplaceable: their intuitive pattern recognition, creative thinking, and ability to turn insights into action are crucial,” said Andesite’s co-founder and CEO Brian Carbaugh, a former director of the CIA’s Special Activities Center.

Andesite’s ‘Bionic SOC’

Andesite’s AI-driven SOC platform is designed to change how security teams operate—not by automating everything, but by eliminating inefficiencies so analysts can focus on real threats.

Here’s how it works:

• Context-Aware AI consolidates fragmented data across different tools, helping analysts make sense of threat intelligence faster.
• Evidentiary AI ensures that every AI-driven decision is auditable and explainable—no black boxes.
• Adaptive Automation streamlines security workflows, from threat detection to response, reducing manual workloads without sidelining human expertise.

The system is also enterprise-ready, complying with SOC 2 Type I and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, making it deployable in highly regulated industries.

William MacMillan, Andesite’s Chief Product Officer and former CIA CISO, emphasized the goal: “Andesite’s technology frees analysts from toggling between tools and learning countless query languages, so they can focus on hunting down threat actors. Our vision for the SOC is a symbiotic relationship between human and AI that elevates analysts of every skill level. For CISOs, this means not just better outcomes faster, but the ability to buy down more risk with the team they already have.”

This “bionic SOC” approach—where AI enhances rather than replaces analysts—stands in contrast to the automation-first mentality that has dominated the cybersecurity industry.

The Industry’s Blind Spot

The biggest problem in cybersecurity today isn’t the increasing volume of cyberattacks. It’s the fact that the people defending organizations are burning out at an alarming rate.

Security analysts aren’t just dealing with more threats but they’re drowning in disconnected tools, endless alert fatigue, and unrealistic expectations. Studies show that more than half of SOC analysts have considered leaving the field, and when they do, they take years of institutional knowledge with them.

“Our industry has a blind spot,” Andesite stated. “We’ve focused so much on software and hardware that we’ve forgotten about the ‘humanware’ of security workflows. We’ve overlooked the frontline analysts, the threat hunters, and the managers whose judgment and intellectual horsepower are the real engine of modern security operations.”

For Chief Technology Officer Alex Thaman, the problem is clear: “We bring insights, scattered across data islands and buried in unstructured PDFs and wikis, to the edge of action. Andesite keeps the human in control, but upgraded, delivering the right data they need, when they need it, in a human-actionable format.”

Andesite’s platform aims to compress investigative timelines dramatically. Instead of spending hours or days processing security bulletins and searching for indicators across an enterprise, analysts can extract key attack techniques (TTPs) and scan their environment in minutes.

What’s Next for Andesite?

The $23 million in new funding will go toward accelerating product development and scaling go-to-market initiatives. While Andesite has already gained traction in national security, financial services, and healthcare, the company is looking to expand its reach across industries.

For Andesite, the real test will be whether its approach gains widespread adoption among security teams. The cybersecurity industry is flooded with AI-driven tools, but many have failed to deliver real-world results. The challenge for Andesite will be proving that its AI-augmented SOC model can actually reduce burnout and improve security outcomes at scale.

As Andrew Braunberg, Principal Analyst at Omdia, put it: “The convergence of human expertise and AI in cybersecurity operations represents a critical evolution in how enterprises approach threat defense. Solutions that decrease the time, complexity, and cost of integrating with existing security infrastructure, and avoid lengthy implementation projects, are key to realizing better ROI and transformative security outcomes, ultimately achieving the promise of AI.”

Andesite believes the answer isn’t just better tech but it’s better collaboration between humans and AI.

“The future of cybersecurity isn’t just about better technology, but about fundamentally reimagining how humans and machines work together to defend against threats,” Andesite stated. “Our goal is to unlock data, unleash teams, and transform outcomes so enterprises can gain an unfair advantage against those that seek to do them harm.”

The industry can’t afford to keep losing its people.