Spera – an Israel-based cybersecurity startup offering proactive protection from identity-driven threats – announced $10 million in seed funding led by YL Ventures with the participation of prominent angel investors and serial entrepreneurs from leading enterprises including Google, Palo Alto Networks, Akamai, Zendesk, Zscaler, and others.
Launched 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.
Two of the most common and costly attack vectors of last year include identity-based attacks involving compromised credentials and phishing according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report. And while ongoing cloud and SaaS adoption help enterprises operate more efficiently, it also creates existing risks and increases an already expansive attack surface.
Many enterprises struggle with loosely managed identities and over-privileged accounts that attackers leverage for malicious activities. And legacy Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions do not offer data-driven analysis, context, and remediation of this chaos – which would lead to lagging security processes and inter-organizational friction. Plus security professionals lack the context and insights they need to build an effectively secured identity perimeter.
Spera’s platform offers a real-time and continuously updated, risk, and context-based inventory of identities and access across cloud and on-prem environments. And this inventory is then quickly analyzed, assessed, and normalized, thus arming security teams with granular insights for preventing identity-driven attacks.
Spera’s trust-but-verify approach to identity empowers security teams to utilize identity as a business strength while also ensuring that identity security perimeters are not jeopardized by ineffective processes or human error.
The customer feedback has shown that Spera has helped solve over 75% of critical issues within the first weeks of deployment, with high accuracy and easy remediation.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
— Spera CEO Dor Fledel
“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. 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.”
— John Brennan, senior partner at YL Ventures
“Over the past few years, identity has surpassed most other security concerns and has become the key to modern security. 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.”
— Michael Sutton, former CISO at Zscaler
“As far as identity security is concerned, security teams can’t see who accesses what resource, using what identity. 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.”
— Richard Reinders, VP of Information Security at Gravity Payments
“Spera provided us with assurance on our controls’ effectiveness, subsequently reducing the attack surface of our applications. Spera makes the identity risk remediation process collaborative and seamless, ensuring teams are meeting expectations and policies.”
— Douglas Graham, CISO at Lionbridge
