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Elisity Receives $26 M During Series A Funding
The Cyber Security Review | Friday, June 18, 2021
Elisity will use the funding to expand its cloud-based cybersecurity platform, which can assess people's unique identity and context, apps, and devices, including IoT and OT, wherever they operate.
FREMONT, CA: Elisity, the inventor of Cognitive Trust, a novel platform for identity and behavior-based business cybersecurity, recently announced a 26 million dollars Series A fundraising round led by Two Bear Capital and AllegisCyber Capital, with participation from previous seed investor Atlantic Bridge.
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Elisity will use the funding to expand its cloud-based cybersecurity platform, which can assess people's unique identity and context, apps, and devices, including IoT and OT, wherever they operate. By learning behavior to assess risk automatically and continuously, the platform can understand, empower, and dynamically adjust security from the edge to the cloud.
"CISOs are facing ever increasing attack surfaces caused by the shift to remote work, reliance on cloud-based services (and often multi-cloud), and the convergence of IT/OT networks," said Mike Goguen, founder, and managing partner at Two Bear Capital. "Elisity addresses all of these problems by not only enacting a Zero Trust model, but by doing so at the edge and within the behavioral context of each interaction. We are excited to partner with the CEO, James Winebrenner, and his team as they expand the reach of their revolutionary approach to enterprise security."
Elisity is the first cybersecurity business to offer a single platform that is intelligent enough to comprehend how assets and people connect outside corporate boundaries and dynamically modify security for every user, device, data, and app from the edge to the cloud. The Cognitive Trust platform from Elisity combines identification and AI-driven behavioral intelligence to continuously assess risk and improve access, connection, and protection rules that follow assets and people wherever they go. As a result, Elisity helps enterprise-class enterprises of all sizes and industries overcome today's segmented networking-and-security group difficulties by combining asset management, connectivity, and security.
"Achieving a cybersecurity posture that understands both identity and behavior is traditionally very hard," said Spencer Tall, Managing Director, AllegisCyber Capital. "The Elisity Cognitive Trust approach to solve for this was very compelling. Coupled with an exceptional management team that have successfully worked together previously, this makes Elisity a very attractive opportunity for our fund."
Burjiz Pithawala, chief product officer; Sundher Narayan, chief architect; and Srinivas Sardar, vice president of engineering, were the three co-founders of Elisity. They had previously held key positions in product development, engineering, and architecture at Cisco. In addition, James Winebrenner, CEO, managed Viptela's go-to-market strategy from pre-launch to the company's sale to Cisco in 2017. He has also held executive leadership positions at Cisco, Aviatrix, and Checkpoint Software.
"When the security perimeter is no longer the network, we see an incredible opportunity to evolve the way enterprises connect and protect their people and their assets, moving away from strict network constructs to identity and context as the basis for secure access," said Winebrenner. "With Elisity, customers can dispense with the complexity, cost and protracted timeline enterprises usually encounter. We can onboard a new customer in as little as 45 minutes, rather than months or years, moving them to an identity-based access policy, and expanding to their cloud and on-prem footprints over time without having to rip and replace existing identity providers and network infrastructure investments. We do this without making tradeoffs between productivity for employees and the network security posture."
Khalid Raza (co-founder of Viptela and CEO and founder of Graphient), Greg Akers (former SVP Advanced Security Research and Governments at Cisco), Jeff Tantsura (Internet Architecture Board), and Brian Long are among the strategic advisors (co-founder and managing partner at Atlantic Bridge and on Elisity's Board of Directors). Additionally, Mike Goguen and Spencer Tall will join Brian Long on the Elisity board of directors as a result of the transaction.
"Having been a part of Elisity from the early stages, Ive been impressed from the start with their Cognitive Trust platform and the new security paradigm and approach for the enterprise. Their technology is completely transforming the market to provide security beyond the traditional network perimeter. I am excited to be a part of this next round of funding and phase of the company's growth," said Brian Long, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Atlantic Bridge.
"The reality of distributed workforces, shadow IT and convergence of IT and OT calls for a new mindset in how security should be architected and deployed," Pithawala concluded. "The industry must move beyond cloud-only SASE models and point products to holistic solutions that deliver protection as close as possible to the asset. Finally, our partnership with Two Bear and AllegisCyber validates the product and market opportunity and reinforces the strong, early feedback from our customers."
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Regulatory Pressures and Strategic Gaps
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Keeper Security delivers encryption and penetration testing-aligned cybersecurity solutions focused on safeguarding sensitive communications and preventing unauthorized data interception.
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