The need to protect enterprise data is not new, and companies like Israel’s Varonis Systems (Nasdaq: VRNS), which currently has a market cap of $3.2 billion, have for years specialized in doing that. But whereas in the past a company’s data would mainly be held in on-premises servers, today, most data are stored in the public cloud, and often on several different cloud platforms, which means tackling the problem differently.
Israeli startup Dig Security, which was founded last year, is developing a solution for real-time identification of and response to data breaches from cloud platforms.
Today, Dig Security announced that it had raised $34 million in an A round led by US fund SignalFire, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Okta Ventures, and Team8, which led the company’s seed round, reported in March.
Altogether, Dig Security has raised $45 million to date. Other investors in the company, that did not participate in the current round, are CrowdStrike, CyberArk, and Merlin Ventures.
Dig is an acronym of the initial letters of the names of the company’s three founders Dan Benjamin (CEO), Ido Azran (VP R&D), and Gad Akuka (CTO). Dig Security employs 40 people. 35 of them in Israel.
Benjamin says that the big cloud providers, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, offer solutions to protect against data breaches, but they support only their own platforms, and do not suit all existing types of databases. Dig Security, by contrast, connects to all the public clouds, identifies all of the organization’s data that exists on them, examines whether these data are protected in accordance with regulatory requirements, and can identify unusual activity and stop it in real time. Unusual activity could be from an external attack or from someone within the organization.
“We have just connected Dig to a bank in the US, and within an hour we spotted that all the bank’s financial reports were being copied daily to an account on AWS belonging to a former employee. The problem is that organizations don’t know where their data are and where they are flowing to. We look at every action connected to data,” Benjamin says.
Another Israeli startup in cloud data protection is Cyera, which emerged from stealth mode in March this year after raising $60 million. “What is unique about us is that we not only provide visibility and cataloguing of data on the cloud, but also protect it actively,” says Benjamin. “We have a model based on data breaches around the world, and it spots attacks and can deal with them automatically, such as by blocking a user attempting to download data.”
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on September 14, 2022.
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