Cmd, a Vancouver-based cybersecurity platform company that offers control and visibility into production workloads in the cloud and on-premise, announced it has raised $15 million in funding led by GV (formerly Google Ventures). Expa, Amplify Partners, and other strategic investors also participated in this round. Including this round, Cmd has raised a total of $21.6 million.
Cmd was founded in 2016 at the Expa startup studio by CEO Jake King (Hootsuite’s former security operations lead) and Milun Tesovic (Expa partner). The Expa startup studio was founded by Garrett Camp, who is the co-founder of Uber and StumbleUpon. King and Tesovic created Cmd out of the frustrations involved with attempting to gain visibility and control over user activity within server environments.
“There’s an alarming disconnect between the most highly publicized threats and the ones that security practitioners—the ones on the front lines whose role is to protect the organization’s most valuable data—believe pose the largest risk,” said King in a statement. “Defenders have to take on the mindset of the attackers, who are always looking for the easiest way to enter a network undetected. For most organizations, that threat lurks in their underdeveloped approach to securing their infrastructure. Today, that is usually their Linux systems. From rampant use of shared keys to unmanaged privileged access to a lack of insight into the activity happening on these servers, we’ve realized many organizations are flying blind when it comes to Linux security. We’re giving them a flashlight.”
King and Tesovic both started looking for security vendors capable of helping optimize security hygiene for enterprise teams in a frictionless way. And they discovered that most vendors on the market focused on threat detection and preventing sophisticated zero-day attacks. And as they talked to other security professionals, they were not alone.
So the Cmd founding team created a solution to address everyday hygiene issues plaguing security teams every day. And the Cmd platform helps security teams deal with the aftermath when their organization rushes to embrace elastic computing without a plan in place.
And Cmd is considered the first to design their core product to help CIOs, CTOs, and security teams understand, predict, and control user behavior in their Linux environment. By understanding what are normal environments, organizations will be able to use Cmd to build policies that restrict file access, prompt for authentication, or even block risky commands pre-execution.
With this funding round, Cmd will grow its product and engineering teams as the company continues developing new defensive capabilities for its core platform. And in conjunction with this round, Cmd announced the appointment of GV general partner Karim Faris to its board of directors.
“Cmd’s next-generation server security platform is designed to protect production environments, and tailored to the specific needs of large enterprises to granularly control, monitor, and authenticate user activity,” said Faris. “Combined with the strong technical expertise of the Cmd founding team, the company’s approach is highly differentiated and uniquely positioned to meet the growing demand for cloud-native security solutions.”
Cmd started signing customers up in spring 2018. And some of Cmd’s customers include Uber, Qubole, and Zenefits.
Some of Cmd’s advisors include a roster of information security professionals including Uber CISO and former director of security at Facebook John “Four” Flynn, former CERT-EU head Freddy Dezeure, and Nordstrom CISO Irwan Tjan.
“Cmd’s vision of getting back to basics represents a paradigm shift in Linux security,” explained Tjan. “The area is ripe for innovation and Cmd’s more than up for the challenge. I’m thrilled to be supporting the Cmd team.”
