Spera, a Palo Alto-based security startup that provides businesses with the tools to proactively protect themselves from identity-driven threats, today said it has raised a $10 million seed funding round led by YL Ventures, with participation from a number of prominent angel investors and serial entrepreneurs.
The company’s founders, Dor Fledel (CEO) and Ariel Kadyshevitch (CTO), argue that an organization’s identity surface is now the number one attack vector, yet as companies increasingly rely on an ever-growing number of third-party services, that’s also becoming increasingly hard to manage with legacy tools. That often means that employees get access rights to tools they don’t actually need to do their job and unnecessary high privileges in other tools — or that accounts of employees who have left the company may remain active on some third-party services.
“Without visibility, these risks cannot be effectively measured, prioritized and remediated,” the company explains. “Attackers use this chaos to their advantage, despite the continued investment of security teams in IAM, Zero Trust programs and other identity security and risk management solutions.”
With Spera, businesses get a single end-to-end tool that allows them to manage all aspects of identity security, be that visibility and context to prevent attacks, or remediation when things go awry.
In the current market, where many businesses are looking to cut costs, a service like Spera also serves a purpose that goes beyond security: it helps companies lower their license costs, as it allows them to find dormant accounts that can be turned off.
The company says that getting started on its platform is a relatively quick process thanks to its agent-less integration with existing identity providers and cloud- and on-prem applications.
“Spera clearly zeroed in on one of today’s main CISO priorities and pain points, given the remarkable number of customers they’ve closed while still in stealth,” said John Brennan, senior partner at YL Ventures. “We’ve been bullish on the identity space for a while now, in light of the consistent feedback from our network that despite a massive allocation of budget to IAM solutions, existing IAM tools failed to deliver on their promise. Spera is changing the industry’s entire approach to identity, delivering a platform that is a single source of contextualized identity-related risk.”
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