Israeli startup company Ermetic, which develops a data-leak prevention system for securing the cloud environment, announces a $17.25 million funding round. The round was led by California-based Accel, while existing investors like Norwest Ventures Partners, Glilot Capital Partners, and Target Global also got in on the action. This round brings the company’s total funds raised to just about $27 million in total.
“We fundraised again to become market leaders”
Ermetic has developed a platform that automates the detection of all active users and applications in the cloud environment, runs analysis on all the organizational policies, roles, and permissions creating a broad picture of the cloud environment. This is done in order to improve its capabilities and implement the required data-security changes: understanding what permissions need to be canceled, creating a policy for managing and fixing access threats, analyzing workflow and alerting to breach attempts or authorization changes, and more. In addition, Ermetic’s system recommends configurations and authorizations for the DevOps team, instead of them trying to sieve through 2500 different authorization configurations.
The Israeli startup went through a funding round only two months ago, leading CEO Shai Morag to explain in a conversation with Geektime the reasoning behind this current round: “There’s an incredible market opportunity for our product right now, that’s why we fundraised. In order to accelerate into market leaders. Like us, so do the VC funds understand the opportunity here, resulting in many of them running to invest.”
When asked about the impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic on the company, Morag explains that the awareness and importance of cloud capabilities have seen a sharp increase over the last few months and with it a need for concrete data-security solutions in the cloud infrastructure: “Because of this, we are seeing the number of inquiries go up,” he says.
According to Morag, having a leading VC like Accel join - invested in companies like Facebook, Spotify, and Slack - is very exciting. “We are delighted Accel joined as an investor. The incoming flow of capital will allow us to expand our market share in the evergrowing sector of cloud infrastructure authorization management.”
Ermetic was founded in 2019 by 4 cyber entrepreneurs who have already tasted the startup exit Kool-Aid, before uniting: CEO Shai Morag, who founded Palo Alto Networks-acquired company Secdo; CTO Michael Dolinsk; CPO Sivan Krigsman, who founded Microsoft-acquired Aorato; and CBO Arick Goomanovsky, founder of Sygnia, which was acquired by Temasek for $250 million after only raising $4 million. The company says that the newly injected funds will go towards the expansion of R&D and help bulk up marketing, sales, and customer service efforts.
