Entro Security, a Boston, MA-based provider of Non-Human Identity (NHI) and secrets management platform, just announced the closing of an $18m Series A funding. In conjunction with it, Itzik Alvas, CEO and co-founder of the company, replied to our questions about the company, the funding, and future plans.
FinSMEs: Hi Itzik, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I’m Itzik Alvas and I co-founded Entro Security alongside our CTO Adam Cheriki. We both have over 15 years of experience in the Cyber Security Industry. Adam and I met in the IDF where we served in one of the leading cyber units. Following my military service, I held senior cyber security and R&D roles in leading organizations such as Microsoft, & Maccabi Healthcare Services where I was the CISO. During my career, I experienced first-hand the tremendous challenges of managing and securing the lifecycle of non-human identities and secrets, including being breached… more than once. At the time there was no solution out there for this burning non-human identity(NHI) and secrets problem, and believe me when I say no one searched harder than me. So I decided to find the solution myself. This is how Entro was born, pioneering the non-human identity management category that Entro currently leads.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Entro. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
Sure, everyone understands and values protecting human identities, but what people are not aware of is that for each human identity in an organization, there are at least 45 non-human identities, such as service accounts, cloud access tokens and API keys.
Those NHIs are essentially programmatic access keys that applications are using to authenticate and access services in the cloud. There are thousands of non-human identities in each organization. The number and variety of NHIs per organization are exploding as cloud services are on the rise with ever-growing workloads, and more and more NHIs and secrets are being created by R&D teams. These NHIs are stored and exposed across various locations such as vaults, code, Wiki, Slack and others. In addition, the R&D teams responsible for creating them are not the ones responsible for securing them. There is no security oversight or standards. It is evident that there is a high demand for a solution as organizations face a higher risk than ever before. NHI and secrets breaches are among the top two most frequent attacks with more than 19% of breaches resulting from compromised secrets (IBM 2023, Verizon 2023). Failure to properly secure NHIs can lead to devastating consequences, including financial loss, reputational damage, legal liabilities and regulatory non-compliance.
Managing and securing non-human identities is a major challenge for security teams today. Entro enables organizations to secure them, oversee their usage and automate their lifecycle from inception to rotation.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
Entro is the only platform that provides full life cycle management and seamless integration with advanced capabilities such as full NHI and secrets inventory with secrets exposure classification and Non-Human Identity Detection and Response(NHIDR). None of the existing solutions provided an end-to-end solution that continuously monitors and protects NHIs and programmatic access to cloud services and data.
In the past few weeks, several NHI point solutions have emerged from stealth; however, they lack the full NHI management life cycle from inception to rotation. Entro is the only platform built by a former CISO for CISOs that provides advanced capabilities such as removing secrets exposure and NHIDR.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
Absolutely. We just raised an $18 million A round led by Dell Technologies Capital. This is a testimonial of the amazing work we are doing and the adoption we are seeing by global enterprises. The investment comes one year after our seed investment round, bringing our total funding to $24 million.
FinSMEs: Can you share some numbers and achievements for the business?
Since emerging from stealth in 2023, we are already working with dozens of customers including Booking, SolarWinds, Elastic, KAYAK and Regatta, proving our value in solving the NHI problem. Our platform achieved Gartner Cool Vendor status, the fastest in history, just three months after emerging from stealth. We won many industry global prizes and are keeping our position as the global leader in the non-human identity management space.
FinSMEs: What are your medium-term plans?
As mentioned IBM and Verizon reports rank NHI and secrets breaches as the second most frequent attack vector, and the most costly to organizations, emphasizing the need for our platform. We see huge traction for our platform daily. With our new funding, we plan to scale global operations, meet the strong demand for our platform across key industries and triple our employee base by the end of 2024. We are eager to use the Series A funding to continue to lead this vertical and serve our fast-growing customer base.
FinSMEs
18/06/2024