Monarx

About Monarx

Monarx, founded in 2017 by Matt Hoffman, Jon Gay, and Brian Karney, operates as a specialized cybersecurity firm headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company's inception traces back to the operational challenges faced by brothers Jon and Tom Gay at their data center, Inetz. Frustrated by constant system infiltrations, they developed a novel software solution focused on post-exploit prevention, which later formed the foundational technology for Monarx after they partnered with Matt Hoffman, a seasoned entrepreneur with a background in venture capital and multiple startups.

Monarx provides a security solution tailored for the web hosting industry, serving clients like web hosting providers and their end-users. The business model allows hosting providers to either automatically protect websites or to monetize the service by detecting malicious activity and then selling automated protection to the affected site owners. This dual approach provides flexibility and creates a new revenue stream for hosting companies. The company has secured a total of $9.4 million in funding over two rounds, with a significant Series A round of $6.1 million in March 2023 led by Signal Peak Ventures.

The core of Monarx's offering is a behavior-based, signature-less malware detection and prevention system. Unlike traditional security tools that rely on recognizing known malware signatures, Monarx's technology analyzes what a file or script does, allowing it to identify and neutralize novel and zero-day threats. The platform consists of several key components: a 'Protect' module that blocks the execution of malicious payloads like web shells in real-time, and a 'Hunter' module that performs scans for existing threats. This is managed by a lightweight server-side agent that integrates directly with the PHP engine and other common web languages, sending data to the Monarx Cloud for analysis, which minimizes the resource impact on the host server. This system is particularly effective for protecting open-source content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, which are frequent targets for attackers.