GreyNoise Intelligence

GreyNoise Intelligence

GreyNoise Intelligence was founded in 2016 by Andrew Morris, a security researcher who saw that most alerts flooding enterprise SOCs were triggered by mass internet scanning, botnets, and research crawlers—not targeted adversaries. The company emerged from the startup studio and early-stage fund DataTribe, which backs founders with deep expertise in cybersecurity and data science from the U.S. intelligence community and national labs. GreyNoise's origin is tied directly to that operational frustration: hours spent triaging benign events that looked identical to reconnaissance activity. GreyNoise deploys a planetary-scale network of passive honeypot sensors that collect connection attempts, scans, and exploit probes across hundreds of IP addresses. The data is tagged and categorized into two streams: benign noise from known services like Shodan, Censys, and university research projects, and malicious activity from opportunistic worms, botnets, and mass-exploitation campaigns. Customers access this intelligence through an API, native integrations with platforms like Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, and Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR, or the community-facing "GreyNoise Visualizer." The firm provides context on IP addresses seen scanning the internet—a fundamentally different approach from threat intelligence feeds that blacklist IPs based on third-party reports. The core product sits at the intersection of cybersecurity, enterprise software, and applied AI/ML, trained to classify internet-wide traffic patterns. The firm has grown from a solo research project into an organization with roughly two dozen employees, concentrated in the Washington, D.C. area. GreyNoise secured a seed round from DataTribe and participation from service-provider heavyweights: in 2019, it launched its first commercial API; by 2024, integrations exceeded 30 distinct security platforms. In March 2024, GreyNoise released "Sift," an AI-powered analysis tool that automates threat-hunting queries and generates plain-language summaries of emerging internet-wide activity (per the firm, March 2024). The company does not operate adjacent philanthropic vehicles but contributes to the research community through free API tiers and detailed blog posts analyzing novel exploitation patterns. GreyNoise is structurally distinct from nearly every cybersecurity vendor in two ways. First, it does not sell a threat-feed subscription or a detection product—it sells an enrichment layer that makes existing tools smarter. Second, its asset is a purpose-built sensor network, not a pooled customer-telemetry data lake. That architecture gives GreyNoise an independent ground-truth perspective on internet-wide activity that no single enterprise could replicate, and it positions the company as a neutral data utility rather than a competitive platform.