Polar Security Unveils Cloud Data Protection Platform, $8.5 Million Launch Round

Polar Security, a technology startup for continuously protecting sensitive data in the cloud, said today it has emerged from stealth with $8.5 million seed funding.

Founded in January 2021, the Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup provides an agentless platform that automatically discovers and classifies sensitive cloud-native data — both known and unknown cloud data stores. This provides “complete visibility of all data stores,” CEO and co-founder Guy Shanny said in an email — including insights into the types of data, the potential and actual data streams, who has access to it, and the owner of the data store.

The startup says its “data security attitude management” platform also offers detection of vulnerabilities that could lead to data exfiltration or ransomware, as well as detecting compliance violations for regulations such as GDPR.

Currently, data creation has become “chaotic,” Shanny told VentureBeat in the email. Data is no longer centralized in a single database or storage, but decentralized across multiple public cloud infrastructure platforms, regions and virtual private clouds and services — as well as pipelined to data warehouses for further analysis, he said.

“Datastores are constantly being created by developers or as a byproduct of your cloud workload apps. This includes managed, unmanaged and unknown ‘shadow data’ — any sensitive data created that security and compliance teams don’t know exists and therefore can’t control or protect,” Shanny said. “In most organizations we’ve talked to, answering simple questions like where is the business data, what’s in it and is it sensitive, and where it’s going is a very manual process.”

Polar Security solves this problem with automation, and “only our unique technology does this completely agentless, with no impact on the workload,” he said.

customer traction

While the startup doesn’t have paying customers yet, it has deployed its technology in manufacturing workloads with companies in the US and Israel “that will soon be converted to paying customers,” Shanny said. The names of the clients are not being disclosed at this time, but among them are several public companies with thousands of employees, he said.

Polar Security says it increased its seed funding in January 2021, when the company was founded, although funding has not been announced as of yet with the rise of stealth.

The seed round was led by Glilot Capital Partners. Other donors who took part included IBI Tech Fund and a number of angel investors, including Jim Reavis, Cloud Security Alliance co-founder and CEO, former RSA Chief Technology Officer Tim Belcher, former Qualys President Ann Johnson and IBM Security Vice President Tom noonan.

Growth financing

The remainder of the funding will be used for staff recruitment, with the aim of doubling the company’s size from 20 to 40 people over the next six months.

Shanny and one of his co-founders, chief technology officer Roey Yaacovi, previously worked in the cyber division of the Israeli Prime Minister’s office. Earlier, Shanny said that at age 14, he founded a web vulnerability research firm, FreshServ, which he sold to a web hosting company in Israel four years later.

A third Polar Security co-founder, Chairman Dov Yoran, previously served as an executive in Cisco’s security company following Cisco’s acquisition of his company ThreatGRID.