Spera Security is a company that prevents account takeovers, stolen credentials, and phishing attacks. A few weeks ago, Spera raised $10 million. And to learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Spera Security CEO and co-founder Dor Fledel.
Dor Fledel’s Background
Co-founder photo From left to right – Dor Fledel (co-founder and CEO / Ariel Kadyshevitch (co-founder and CTO)
Ariel Kadyshevitch (Spera co-founder and CTO) and Fledel met during their time in the Israeli Defense Forces where they served in the military intelligence Unit 8200.
“Following my time in the elite IDF academic training program ‘Talpiot,’ I received my MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and went on to work as a Product Manager in Google’s Cloud Cyber Division,” said Fledel. “Wanting to gain a more well-rounded background in the business of tech, I joined the venture capital firm OpenView as a cybersecurity investor.”
Kadyshevitch has a rich technological background that he developed during his IDF service and later as a team lead in cybersecurity startup Argus. And he went on to work as a senior AI researcher at Hi Auto prior to becoming the co-founder and CTO of Spera.
Idea Behind Spera Security
How did the idea behind Spera Security come together? Fledel and Kadyshevitch knew that helping mature and strengthen identity security postures would have the highest business impact and would help reduce risk, drive efficiency, and assure compliance.
“Using our backgrounds in security, deep tech, and business management – we set out into the depths of the Identity Jungle. Our core aspiration was to overhaul the identity security space with a new approach that provides immediate value and ROI to our customers,” Fledel explained. “We ideated Spera during a rigorous joint trek up to the base camp of Mt. Everest, where the physical, as well as mental, challenges we overcame together, cemented our determination to jump headfirst into the startup journey. One of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of this journey thus far has been building a team of passionate professionals that listen and learn, helping Spera become exactly what our customers need for their identity challenges.”
Challenges Faced Building The Company
When I asked Fledel about the challenges faced in building the company, he noted that identity security is not a new problem.
“It intensified rapidly as a challenge that legacy solutions, processes, and methodologies were unable to resolve with sufficient ROI,” Fledel added. “Spera has an entirely new approach to an old problem, and our challenge will include helping CISOs and security teams see the need for a paradigm shift which will help their work become more streamlined, efficient, and cost-effective.”
Core Products/Features
Upon asking Fledel about the company’s core products, he cited the following:
1.) Integration in minutes – Using an easy, agentless process, Spera seamlessly integrates with identity providers and both cloud and on-prem applications and produces a real-time picture of the identity attack surface.
2.) Classification and prioritization:
a.) Spera’s Identity Schema normalizes data and performs risk classification in the usage analysis.
b.) Spera’s Identity and Access Graph contextualizes the data and prioritizes identity issues based on severity and risk, driving effective remediation.
3.) Remediation, monitoring, and reporting:
a.) By applying critical context and actionable insights to its remediation processes, Spera strengthens identity postures without jeopardizing the business.
b.) Spera’s ongoing identity threat detection and response (ITDR) solution prevents new threats, ensures that identity policies are implemented, and tracks least-privilege metrics.
Spera was recently launched and the work on the company and product has been ongoing over the past few months. The main sources of feedback and iteration have been due to strong relationships with leading CISOs, security leaders, and customers. Spera was built to help them tackle a problem that will persist and have a greater impact on their work. And together, they improved the actionability and clarity of their insights, the time-to-value, and adjustments that removed even more manual work and additional tasks for practitioners. After being in private beta, Spera is now in General Availability and is ready to create impact.
Success Stories
Spera has helped customers disable 40 partially offboarded contractor accounts, fixed onboarding processes for system administrators, and detected and remediated MFA misconfigurations on 109 accounts. And the company also removed underutilized Box licenses and saved a customer about $60,000 in 1 week.
Funding
As mentioned earlier, Spera has raised a $10 million seed round. The funding was provided by cybersecurity venture capital firm YL Ventures.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Spera from its competition?
1.) Immediate security value – Spera’s ROI is unparalleled, achieving in no time what IGA and SSO solutions achieve in 5 years. And within 1 hour of deployment, Spera produces a comprehensive report on the state of your identity security with actionable insights. On average, Spera helps solve over 75% of critical issues within the first weeks of deployment, with high accuracy and easy remediation.
2.) Unprecedented risk visibility and context – Spera uses automation to continuously uncover identity risks and their context, enabling security teams to focus on remediating what matters most based on user correlation, identity analytics, and usage patterns.
3.) All identity data, in one place – Spera puts the IAM team in control by automatically building a real-time, comprehensive identity inventory of all users, identities, applications, environments, and their enriched context in one interface. Then Spera aggregates, correlates, and normalizes all permissions, usage, and changes made to your identity stack.
Future Company Goals
What are Spera’s future company goals? Fledel informed me that following the company’s launch, the main goals are expanding and enriching their team along with providing them with the tools they need to make Spera the standard for identity security. And the company will work with partners to continue extending market reach, helping organizations turn painful tasks into automated and streamlined processes, giving them confidence in their IAM programs.
