Sweet Security today announced $12 million in seed funding and the launch of its Cloud Runtime Security Suite.
The round was led by Glilot Capital Partners with participation from CyberArk Ventures and angel investors including Gerhard Eschelbeck, former CISO at Google and Travis McPeak, who led product security at Databricks.
Sweet was founded by retired Brigadier General, Dror Kashti, former CISO of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), retired Colonel, Eyal Fisher, former head of the Cyber Department at Unit 8200 and Orel Ben-Ishay, former Head of the Cybersecurity R&D center at Unit 81. With a clear vision on how to best raise the bar for cloud defense, they built a cloud-native runtime security suite that enables security teams to stop cloud workload attacks, quickly and with surgical precision.
While leading the IDF’s digital transformation effort, Sweet CEO and co-founder Dror Kashti found that even though securing development environments is essential, current cloud runtime security solutions are insufficient for preparing a company for a breach. As critical as it is for companies to shift their cloud security left, attacks only unfold in runtime. Companies require technological “boots on the ground” to detect them. Existing detection tools either provide very limited functionality or aren’t optimised for the cloud. Defenders need cloud-native runtime protections that provide a full narrative for understanding and stopping attacks as they unfold.
Sweet’s Cloud Runtime Security Suite enables CISOs and security teams to level up their cloud security from partial to complete defense. Providing robust defenses across all stages of an attack, its feature set includes Detection & Response, Discovery and Prevention – all in runtime. Sweet’s runtime sensor takes under five minutes to deploy, immediately providing cloud-native cluster visibility. It streams key application data and business logic to its servers, using an innovative framework to profile workload behavior anomalies and contextualize them with traditional TTPs.
Sweet’s modern attack detection model and patent-pending auto learning technology enable immediate delivery of critical, comprehensive attack findings that allow mitigation before, during and after attacks occur. As a result, Sweet provides CISOs with the technical underpinnings needed to be accountable for cloud security. It also enables them to refresh corporate SOC and IR processes for cloud native environments, enabling the organization to ease into cloud adoption and digital transformation.
For security teams, Sweet provides a powerhouse set of runtime “must-haves”, providing a fully contextualized, at-a-glance attack narrative, backed up with extensive response capabilities, a detailed runtime topology and the ability to prioritize DevSecOps remediation efforts.
Michael Shaulov, co-founder and CEO, Fireblocks, said: “As a large, cloud-first company, our business relies on our ability to protect our customers’ digital assets. We needed a runtime security suite that matched our scale, speed, and technology.
“Sweet’s technology provides real-time security detection & prevention capabilities to our cloud workloads and, importantly, with minimal business interruption. Its insights on connectivity, visibility to our cloud’s topology, and automatic classification of real-time threats is a force multiplier to our Security Operation Center and our DevSecOps teams.”
Srinath Kuruvadi, MD, head of cloud security, JPMorgan Chase & Co, said: “Sweet’s vision for cloud runtime security is spot on, with a deep understanding of how cloud attacks unfold, and critically, enables defenders to be much more effective at containing them.
“Attacks against cloud workloads are only going to increase in frequency and sophistication. The industry needs comprehensive security solutions to face them and Sweet is driving this shift with its extraordinary vision and expertise.”
Kobi Samboursly, Founding Partner, Glilot Capital Partners, said: “Investing in Sweet Security was a no-brainer. First, it’s addressing an increasingly problematic cloud security gap – cloud runtime defense. Second, Dror, Eyal and Orel bring superpowers to the table: the depth and breadth of their cloud security expertise and their ability to build and mentor talented, high performing teams. Sweet is off to a great start and we look forward to supporting its success.”
Dror Kashti, co-founder and CEO, Sweet Security, said: “‘Cybersecurity’ and ‘delightful’ are not words that normally go hand in hand, but we want our customers to use them in the same sentence when talking about our solution.
“We feel our timing is right to make that happen. If SOC and IR teams don’t have to constantly tune their security products or sift through mountains of alerts, they’ll execute at a higher level, and they’ll be happier. Cloud detection and response may be complex, but it doesn’t have to be painful.”
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