PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Spera, an Israeli cybersecurity startup offering proactive protection from identity-driven threats, today announced $10 million in seed funding led by YL Ventures, with participation from notable security and go-to-market leaders, prominent angel investors and serial entrepreneurs from leading enterprises including Google, Palo Alto Networks, Akamai, Zendesk, Zscaler and others. Founded by cybersecurity veterans Dor Fledel, CEO and Ariel Kadyshevitch, CTO, Spera is the first Identity Security Posture Management solution delivering end-to-end identity attack surface management, risk reduction and identity threat prevention, detection and response.
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report, identity-based attacks involving compromised credentials and phishing were the two most common and costly attack vectors of 2022. While ongoing cloud and SaaS adoption helps enterprises operate more efficiently, it also compounds existing risks and increases an already expansive attack surface. Most enterprises struggle with loosely managed identities and stale, over-privileged accounts that attackers leverage for malicious activities. Legacy Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions do not provide data-driven analysis, context and remediation of this chaos, which leads to lagging security processes and inter-organizational friction. As a result, security professionals lack the context and insights they need to build an effectively secured identity perimeter.
“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.”
Spera’s platform creates a real-time, continuously updated, risk and context-based inventory of identities and access across cloud and on-prem environments. This inventory is then rapidly analyzed, assessed and normalized, arming security teams with critical granular insights for remediating and preventing identity-driven attacks.
“Over the past few years, identity has surpassed most other security concerns and has become the key to modern security,” said Michael Sutton, former CISO at Zscaler. “Making sense of the identity sprawl and controlling it while enabling business is a challenge existing solutions could not resolve. Spera uniquely reduces identity risks with a quick time-to-value and a streamlined, agentless approach.”
Spera’s “trust-but-verify” approach to identity security empowers security teams to leverage identity as a business strength while ensuring that identity security perimeters aren’t jeopardized by ineffective processes or human error.
“Identity threat prevention is top of mind for every security team and Spera is a force multiplier for them. The platform eliminates the need to log into multiple portals or stitch together data from various teams, systems, multiple identity providers and apps,” said Spera CEO, Dor Fledel. “Spera will become the comprehensive, ‘one-stop-shop’ for streamlined Identity Security Posture Management and Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR), bringing enterprises the identity confidence they deserve.”
“As far as identity security is concerned, security teams can’t see who accesses what resource, using what identity,” says Richard Reinders, VP Information Security at Gravity Payments. “Legacy solutions can't pinpoint critical identity risks such as stale contractor accounts, and demand time, effort and resources to provide us with insights to do so. Spera’s approach is entirely different. Quick integration, streamlined access reviews and granular insights give me a complete picture of my identity surface.”
Customer feedback has shown that Spera has helped solve more than 75% of critical issues within the first weeks of deployment, with high accuracy and easy remediation. “Spera provided us with assurance on our controls' effectiveness, subsequently reducing the attack surface of our applications," said Douglas Graham, CISO at Lionbridge. "Spera makes the identity risk remediation process collaborative and seamless, ensuring teams are meeting expectations and policies.”
For more information on securing your identity jungle, please visit https://www.spera.security/.
About Spera
Security teams are lost in an identity jungle and burn time and resources by manually implementing identity security policies. Spera helps security teams take control of their identity sprawl, manage partially offboarded users and protect against stolen credentials and account takeovers. The company’s innovative platform provides visibility and contextualized insights into identities, permissions and actions, collected from identity providers and applications (SaaS, cloud providers and on-prem). Within a few weeks of the agentless deployment, organizations will minimize risk, improve business efficiency and ensure continuous identity compliance.
About YL Ventures
YL Ventures funds and supports brilliant Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneurs from seed to lead. Based in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, YL Ventures manages five funds with $800M in total assets under management. The firm accelerates the evolution of portfolio companies via a powerful network of Chief Information Security Officers, global industry leaders and a dedicated team of experts, providing tailored guidance and hands-on support on all critical company-building domains. The firm's track record includes investments in Israeli cybersecurity unicorns such as Axonius and Orca Security, as well as successful, high-profile portfolio company acquisitions by major corporations including Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, CA and Proofpoint.
