- Panther Labs — a cybersecurity company founded by headed by Airbnb and AWS alumni — announced it has raised $15 million in Series A funding to accelerate the development of its open-source security platform
Panther Labs — a cybersecurity company founded by headed by Airbnb and AWS alumni — announced it has raised $15 million in Series A funding to accelerate the development of its open-source security platform designed as an alternative to legacy SIEMs. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from S28 Capital, Innovation Endeavors, and Fathom Capital. Including this round of funding, the investment brings the company’s total funding to $20.5 million. And Lightspeed partner Gaurav Gupta will join the board of directors.
Due to the rising adoption of cloud platforms and services, security teams have been struggling to centralize and monitor activity across environments at scale. And Panther provides an open, scalable, and developer-friendly solution for security engineers at cloud-first organizations such as GitLab to detect and respond to suspicious activity in real-time.
Panther is able to ingest terabytes of security log data per day from a variety of sources, including AWS and GCP, security tools like Osquery and OSSEC along with a growing number of SaaS applications such as G Suite, Okta, and OneLogin.
While data is processed, detections are run and alerts are dispatched in real-time to destinations like Slack, Jira, and PagerDuty. And collected data is normalized and retained to power future investigations in a serverless data lake powered by AWS or the cloud-native data platform Snowflake.
Panther Labs was launched in 2018 by former Airbnb security alumni Jack Naglieri. And during his time at Airbnb, Naglieri architected StreamAlert — which is a popular open source security project used by teams at organizations like Netflix, Coinbase, and Duo Security. That journey inspired his vision for Panther.
And with this round of funding, Panther will invest in key functions like sales, marketing, security, and engineering with additional features coming to make its platform smarter, portable, and easier to use.
KEY QUOTES:
“Security practitioners should spend their time crafting high-fidelity detections to identify threats, but instead, they spend the bulk of their time on operations. Our team faced these challenges at extreme scale at Airbnb and Amazon, and we built Panther to help security teams everywhere operationalize cloud-scale data volumes with low overhead and code-driven automation.”
— Panther CEO Jack Naglieri
“The amount of data GitLab needs to analyze for security insights is enormous and growing rapidly. We evaluated several industry-leading SIEM solutions and found their rules engines too inflexible and management overhead too large. With Panther, we were able to seamlessly integrate their tools into our existing development and deployment workflows. Panther’s serverless architecture, Python-based detection framework, and open data formats provide the scalable and future-proofed foundation we need to protect our most important assets.”
— Kyle Smith, Security Manager at GitLab
“Serverless and developer-centric is simply the best way for organizations to address their myriad of security challenges. Automation and scale are paramount for under-resourced security teams, and Panther Labs is perfectly positioned to capture that demand. If your company is increasing its usage of cloud services while also facing challenges with security visibility and threat detection, Panther will be an immediate multiplier on your security investment.”
— Gaurav Gupta, partner at Lightspeed
