Sweet Security, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based provider of a runtime security suite for the cloud, just announced a $33m Series A funding round. In conjunction with the round closing, Dror Kashti, Co-Founder and CEO, answered our questions about the company, their product, the funding, and future plans.
FinSMEs: Hi Dror, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I’m Dror Kashti, Co-Founder and CEO at Sweet Security. I served more than 20 years in IDF’s Unit 8200, filling various technological and managerial roles in cyber, digital, and data domains and retired as a Brigadier General. Prior to Sweet, I served as Chief Information Security Officer of the Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF), where I led the organization’s transition into the public cloud. Before that, I established and commanded the chief information officer (CIO) department.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Sweet Security. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
Current cloud security stacks were built as an extension of on-premises technologies, making them the operational equivalent of forcing a square peg into a round hole. The urgent need for cloud-native security tools has led to many companies to implement tools in an ad-hoc fashion, leaving them to manage an increasingly redundant set of cloud security solutions. Security teams are buried in mountains of alerts from multiple tools, making it incredibly difficult to know where to start, let alone to execute well.
Furthermore, security teams are accountable for but not in charge of the cloud, which is the purview of DevOps teams. This also impedes the ability to address the huge backlog unaddressed alerts. And then there are issues of scale. The average enterprise has 500,000 containers, 50 times more than the number of endpoints they need to manage. Be it compromised permissions, bad access or unpatched vulnerabilities, exploitation is a matter of time and users cannot predict where and how an exploit might occur. In short: questions on “who”, “what”, “where” and “when” are entirely cloudy.
Our Runtime Security Suite makes cloud security both achievable and effective by leveraging runtime insights to help security teams focus on cloud risks that matter, as they unfold, and feed those insights back into the CI/CD pipeline to better harden their environments.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
1 – We shift cloud security right, focusing on runtime risks, discovering them and stopping them in real-time.
2 – Sweet is a runtime suite — a unified runtime platform catering to critical cloud security use-cases including Incidents Detection & Response, Vulnerabilities Management, Posture Enhancement, and Non-Human Identities Management
3 – Sweet’s behavioral runtime analysis cuts down cloud risks like no logs-based solution does. We developed an eBPF-based sensor that performs deep application profiling, creating a baseline for normal and anomalous behaviors. We investigate core elements to identify active risks at different use-cases.
4 – With this announcement, Sweet brings first-to-market capabilities for managing non-human identities in runtime. Using its novel sensor-based technology and Layer 7 capabilities, Sweet’s behavioral analysis reveals which machine was the origin of a chain of actions and for what purpose. Sweet’s novel technology completely upgrades organizations’ posture through runtime insights, as well as takes their NHI management to the next level.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
We just announced a $33 million Series A funding round, six months after coming out of stealth. The round was led by Evolution Equity Partners and joined by Munich Re Ventures and Glilot to use the funding to scale up our operations in the U.S. and expand our cloud runtime platform.
FinSMEs: Can you share some numbers and achievements for the business?
Since exiting stealth we have closed around a dozen customers and roughly doubled our headcount to a team of 30 people. Our approach was validated by Gartner in a recent report on mitigating cloud risks, and we were able to close a healthy Series A and are thriving despite ongoing uncertainty in our home country.
FinSMEs: What are your medium-term plans?
Scale up our operations in the U.S. and expand our cloud runtime platform.
FinSMEs
06/03/2024