Britive Raises $5.4 million in Late Seed Funding

The new funds will be used to reinvent security for multi-cloud enterprise environments.

The new funds will be used to reinvent security for multi-cloud enterprise environments.

On September 10, 2020, Britive, a cloud-native security solution provider announced that it has raised $5.4M in late seed funding led by Upfront Ventures.

Kara Nortman, Partner at Upfront Ventures, joins the Britive board in conjunction with the investment. Co-investors in the round include venture firms OneWay and SmartGate, Andrew Peterson, CEO of Signal Sciences, and Dave Cole, CEO of Open Raven.

Seasoned security entrepreneurs each with 20+ years of industry experience, CEO Artyom Poghosyan, and CTO Alex Gudanis founded Britive in 2018 to challenge inertia within the security solutions industry, which was slow to react to the new multi-cloud environments of modern enterprises. Existing solutions for protecting enterprise data struggle to meet the pace and complexity challenges of today's multi-cloud environments. Managing privileged access in cloud infrastructures using traditional tools is mostly manual, carrying a high operational overhead. Users tend to accumulate standing permissions as a result, which increases security risk. Additionally, privileges are often granted in perpetuity without ever being audited, making them preferred targets for attack.

Britive's patent-pending technology delivers infinitely greater control over access privileges, allowing users to dynamically elevate their own privilege levels (on a pre-authorization basis) to perform key administrative tasks for the minimum time requirement. Britive's intelligent engine learns user behavior and recommends privilege right-sizing for users and machine IDs, while constantly monitoring for anomalies that indicate privilege misuse. Unlike the traditional "always-on" permissions, Britive's dynamic permissioning is designed to minimize the available attack surface.

"After 20 years in the industry, I can say that legacy security solutions are simply not agile or scalable enough for today's multi-cloud environments. It's not about improving what exists, it's about creating an entirely new platform of operations that's cloud-first," says Poghosyan. "Today's businesses need to operate at digital speed to stay competitive and to achieve that they need their security solutions to be as agile as cloud, with a single view and set of controls across various cloud systems and apps."

Funding comes on the heels of a number of strategic customers wins in North America, including a global automaker, Fortune 500 retail brand, national healthcare provider, and multinational communications company. Britive plans to apply the funds to further development of its platform technology for monitoring, analyzing, and dynamic orchestration of access privileges across cloud applications and infrastructure, as well as to rev up its go-to-market capability.

"As crazy as it sounds, cloud security, and access management specifically, is among the most valuable and most exciting wedges into a sector I've seen in my career as a VC," said Kara Nortman, Partner at Upfront Ventures. "Art and his team have incredible early traction with deep relationships in the space, and I'm confident in their ability to build a generationally transforming business. We couldn't be more thrilled to work with them on this journey."    

"Multi-cloud deployments are quickly becoming an accepted reality in today's organizations. As organizations scale, privileged access management can quickly become a challenge. To effectively protect against insider and outsider threats, a major shift in our approach is needed," said Yassir Abouesselham, Chief Information Security Officer of Splunk and member of the Britive advisory board. "Britive's cloud-native platform significantly reduces the attack surface, by enabling cloud application and infrastructure users to access the resources they need, when they need them and only for the duration of the transaction. As an information security practitioner and a strong believer in the role of IAM in mitigating cybersecurity risks, I am thrilled to contribute to Britive's vision to disrupt cloud Privileged Access Management."

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