Next-Level Defense Vs. Next-Gen Security Threats

Announcing Lightspeed’s Series A investment in Confluera

Ask a Fortune 5000 CEO today about their top priorities and invariably enterprise security will be a high number on any list. Over the past few years, the awareness of emerging threats to companies continues to rise with a seemingly increasing number of high-profile cyberattacks and data breaches affecting organizations globally. No company despite their size or industry is immune to these threats. Furthermore, with the powerful trend of cloud and mobility taking the enterprise by storm over the past several years, network perimeters are now more fluid and porous, creating new vulnerabilities across a much larger attack surface.

To make matters worse, attackers have also become wiser. New threats are now persisting for long durations within the enterprise, often going undetected for months. Attackers are not only using trusted applications to avoid detection, but also more nuanced techniques such as lateral movement, privilege escalation, and retroactive path deletion to blend into the broader environment.

As companies wake up to these threats, many have realized that cyber security can no longer be ‘set and forget’ operations. As enterprise security spending has surpassed $100B annually, skill shortages, technical complexity, and the growing threat landscape continue to push organizations to find more automated and advanced features. SecOps teams at large organizations are consistently overwhelmed with proliferating alerts and incidence reports, often allowing for potential attacks to go unnoticed until it’s too late with only a post-mortem left for the team to piece together what went wrong.

Today, we are proud to announce our lead Series A investment in Confluera.

Confluera is solving these gaps in enterprise security by building a next-generation platform that enables real-time attack interception and defense. Through Confluera’s platform, enterprises will be able to bolster their security defense across cloud and hybrid infrastructures. Not only does Confluera’s platform help detect and track ongoing attacks, the platform also provides surgical response capabilities to mitigate them in real-time. The Confluera platform also connects to third-party security tools to contextualize their results and eliminate the alert deluge that is plaguing the security teams.

This important enterprise solution has not only resonated with early customers, but also with leading executives who have participated in this round such as John W. Thompson, Chairman of Microsoft and Former CEO of Symantec (note he’s also a Venture Partner at Lightspeed); Frank Slootman, Former CEO of ServiceNow and Lane Bess, Former CEO of Palo Alto Networks. Lightspeed’s investment in Confluera continues to build on a consistent theme for the firm — backing deeply technical founders, Abhijit Ghosh, Niloy Mukherjee, and Bipul Sinha who possess deep insight into a large pain point for the enterprise. We’re excited for them to come out of stealth this week and share their vision with the world.

— Ravi Mhatre and Ansaf Kareem

Authors

Ravi Mhatre