By now, most people know that cybersecurity is one of the hottest areas of technology, as more and more malicious cyberattacks appear around the world, driving up the demand for new security products and services.
Among them, cloud security can be said to be the most popular sub-field in the entire network security field. The reason is simple, with the continuation of remote work and hybrid work, more and more data is flowing to the cloud.
Investors see cloud security as a top priority for the future, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars each quarter into these young companies working to make the cloud more secure. Let’s take a look at the hottest cloud security startups in the first half of 2022.
Immuta
CEO, Co-Founder: Matt Carroll
The venture capital arm of data cloud provider Snowflake apparently sees Immuta as a hot company, becoming one of an additional $100 million in the Boston-based cloud security company.
Immuta is little known among channel vendors, as the data security and access control provider has previously been almost exclusively a direct sales model. But company co-founder and CEO Matt Carroll said that would change that “as soon as possible,” with plans to develop a new channel plan.
Cyera
CEO, Co-Founder: Yotam Segev
Based in San Mateo and Tel Aviv, California, Cyera emerged from stealth mode earlier this year with $60 million in funding from investors including Sequoia, Accel, and Cyberstarts.
Cyera has an ambitious goal of “being at the forefront of data-first transformation in cloud security.” According to a press release issued, Cyera was co-founded in 2021 by CEO Yotam Segev and CTO Tamar Bar-Ilan. More than a decade ago, the two met in the Israeli Ministry of Defense’s Talpiot elite training program and served together in the Israeli Ministry of Defense Unit 8200, where the cloud security unit was created and started.
JupiterOne
CEO, Founder: Erkang Zheng
Headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina, JupiterOne recently joined the $1 billion valuation club, thanks to a $70 million Series C round led by Tribe Capital, with new investors including Intel Capital, Alpha Square Group and existing investors Sapphire, Bain Capital Ventures, Cisco Investments and Splunk Ventures.
Founded in 2018, JupiterOne has raised more than $119 million in financing and has a valuation of more than $1 billion. JupiterOne provides a Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM) platform that consolidates and normalizes data in complex multi-cloud environments.
Laminar
CEO, Co-Founder: Amit Shaked
Laminar has had a great time over the past six-plus months. The cloud data security company raised $37 million in a Series A round late last year and then raised another $30 million in early June, with new investors including Tiger Global Management and Salesforce Venture.
Based in Tel Aviv and New York, Laminar started coming out of stealth mode last year. Laminar said the company “saw a huge demand for Laminar cloud data security solutions from CISOs and their security teams, which in turn drove up investor enthusiasm”.
Lightspin
CEO, Co-Founder: Vladi Sandler
Dell Technologies Capital is clearly one of the companies that really understand Lightspin, leading a $16 million Series A round in Lightspin, with other investors including Ibex Investors.
Based in Tel Aviv, Lightspin was founded in 2020 to develop a context-based cloud security platform for cloud-native and Kubernetes environments. Even though the company is only a few years old, Lightspin said it has “achieved very strong market growth” recently.
BastionZero
CEO, Co-Founder: Sharon Goldberg
BastionZero is doing well in 2022 so far. In March, the Boston-based cloud security startup announced a $6 million seed round led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Akamai and DG Lab Fund. Then in June, BastionZero was shortlisted for the prestigious RSAC Startup of the Year award, and while it didn’t win the competition, it garnered a lot of recognition in the process.
Founded by two Boston University professors, BastionZero provides “a cloud service that controls remote access to infrastructure targets that backend and cloud engineering teams use to build and host software services (such as servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, internal web applications)”.
Netscope
CEO: Sanjay Beri
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Netskope raised $300 million in Series H funding last year and is not only one of the hottest cloud security companies but one of the hottest young tech companies out there.
Netskope’s most recent funding round was led by ICONIQ Growth, and the company plans to use the new funding to expand the platform and go to the market to meet the demand for its Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. Earlier this year, Netskope launched a global partner program to drive service revenue growth.
DoControl
CEO: Adam Gavish
DoControl was founded in 2020 and is headquartered in New York, USA. DoControl raised $30 million in funding this spring, bringing the total raised to $45 million. DoControl’s automated software-as-a-service (SaaS) security products have been adopted by clients of many top enterprises, including cybersecurity companies such as CrowdStrike and Devo.
DoControl said it will use the latest funding to double the size of its workforce and develop a national channel partner program “to enable managed service providers, resellers and other key partners to deliver zero Trusted SaaS data access control capabilities”.
ARMO
CEO, Co-Founder: Shauli Rozen
Tel Aviv-based Armo, which was founded in 2019, raised $4.5 million in a seed round and $30 million in a Series A round this year. Armo announced in April this year that the latest round of financing was led by Tiger Global, with participation from investors such as Hyperwise Ventures.
Armo said the company’s open-source container orchestration solution for Kubernetes has become “a de facto standard operating system for cloud-native applications.”
Wiz
CEO, Co-Founder: Assaf Rappaport
Founded in 2020, Wiz has become an established player in the cybersecurity space, raising hundreds of millions of dollars and pushing it to more than $6 billion last year.
But the New York and Tel Aviv-based cloud security provider is in the spotlight for other reasons, including the recent discovery of vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s popular Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server, which has now been fixed.
Wiz said that Wiz’s architecture can scan the entire cloud environment for all computing types and various cloud services, looking for vulnerabilities, configuration, network, and security issues.
