There is little doubt that with the accelerated transition of organizations to cloud platforms, customers have benefited quite a bit, but DevOps have become a kind of bottleneck for the organization, which constantly has to allocate resources, manage permissions, and do quite a bit of exhausting and repetitive work. There are a few Israeli companies that are mobilizing to make the management of cloud environments a little more sympathetic and Lightlytics is one of them. Today they announced seed and Series A fundraising totalling $30 million. And yes, they can explain what makes their product different from the others in the market - which among other things has also led to early offers to acquire the company.
Mini-Me in the cloud
Lightlytics has developed a SaaS platform that enables scanning and obtaining a complete picture of an organization's cloud activity and analyzes the processes that take place within it. But it does something else that is interesting–it builds a twin environment in the cloud, on which it runs simulations of the changes you put into your product so that before you launch the changes into production, you will know what their impact will be. For example, an organization can find out if a new library you used will create a security problem, or if the ‘;’ you added will lead to crashes and glitches. According to the company, the deployment of the platform takes a few minutes, and the billing is done according to the number of components you have in the cloud.
“What happens behind the scenes is that the simulated engine builds the model of the renewed cloud architecture given the changes that entered the environment and presents a snapshot of the effects it may have on the whole environment– not just on the individual component that is changed. After that, the system predicts the downfall of services, security problems, and whether the code fulfills its purpose,” Or Shoshani, co-founder and CEO of the company, explains to us. Later, he explains, the system can also allow you to see who made changes in the code, and what was its impact on the environment in retrospect.
In recent years we have heard of quite a few Israeli startups that all want to produce cloud management platforms designed for DevOps and SecOps such as env0, SeaLights, Quali, Bridgecrew and more - but Shoshani claims that the "digital twin" that the platform creates is unique to their company, while other products are built on predefined rules that analyze code statically, which he claims creates "a lot of noise for teams" and is mainly intended for security issues. “Security is just one of the use cases. The ability to give an impactful forecast according to the deployment and even after it allows teams to significantly reduce the time it takes to deploy changes and is done more safely," he said.
They already got acquisition offers
Today, Lightlytics announced two rounds of funding, with the first being a $ 4 million Seed round from August 2020, which was close after the company's inception; and the second round, Series A, with a significant amount of $ 26 million led by Energy Impact Partners with participation from Cervin Ventures, TLV Partners, and Glilot Capital Partners. Those masterminds behind Lightlytics are Or Shoshani (CEO), who also founded Cigol which was sold to Mellanox (which in turn was sold to NVIDIA); Stav Sitnikov (CTO) who managed the technology marketing team at Mellanox; and Liran Rupman (VP of Engineering), who managed the Platform team at Imperva.
According to Shoshani, during the year and a half of the company's existence, it has already received takeover bids from "cyber companies" in the cloud field after requests for strategic collaborations. “Our agenda is ‘go big or go home’. We have built a unique technology that will take companies quite a while to bridge the gap, if at all,” Shoshani claims. "When you get such offers and aggressive ones at that, it's exciting, but the investors have supported us and our desire to build a large and growing company."
