AttackIQ bought Portland's DeepSurface to give its attack simulations a hacker roadmap

DeepSurface built software that assesses potential risk and lays out a 'hacker roadmap' to help prioritize the most dangerous vulnerabilities.

$1M seed (September 2020) led by Cascade Seed Fund

Founded in 2017 by CEO James Dirksen, who had previously sold RuleSpace to Symantec and was an executive at Formaltech, and CTO Tim Morgan, a longtime security consultant.

The mission held from day one: 'empower security teams with smarter, more contextualized risk analysis — helping organizations focus on what truly matters' (Morgan).

Acquired by AttackIQ of Santa Clara in February 2025, terms undisclosed; the product is being embedded into AttackIQ's security control validation and breach-and-attack simulation business.

The pairing is technically coherent: attack simulation tells you what an attacker could do; DeepSurface's roadmap tells you what they would do first — exposure validation needs both.

For a seed-stage company of its vintage, an exit to a category leader is a respectable outcome for a crowded vulnerability-management market.

The founders' exits were soft landings into the acquirer's product story rather than acqui-hires, with the product explicitly being embedded.

Dirksen's second successful security-company sale (after RuleSpace to Symantec) shows repeat-founder pattern-matching on what platform buyers need.

A point product finds its exit when a platform buyer needs exactly your context to complete its own story.

As of the February 2025 announcement, DeepSurface's product was being folded into AttackIQ's AEV suite; terms were not disclosed.