Cloud-native data security company Polar Security has raised $8.5 million in seed funding and has launched out of stealth. The round was led by Glilot Capital Partners with participation from IBI Tech Fund, as well as angel investors including cofounder and CEO of Cloud Security Alliance Jim Reavis, former RSA CTO Tim Belcher, former president of Qualys and industry executive Ann Johnson, and cofounder & CEO of Internet Security Systems and VP and GM of IBM security Tom Noonan, among others.
“We built Polar to help companies automate their data security across known and unknown data stores, to continuously prevent cloud data vulnerabilities and compliance violations at any scale – what was until now an unsolvable challenge,” said Guy Shanny, cofounder and CEO of Polar Security. “To solve data security in the cloud, you must focus on the crown jewels – the data stores holding sensitive data – as fast as developers create new data.”
Shanny, who founded, built and sold a web vulnerability research and hosting company at age 14, founded Polar Security alongside Roey Yaacovi, recipient of the prestigious Israeli Prime Minister’s Award for Best Technological Operational Project Achievement, and cybersecurity veteran Dov Yoran.
The company focuses on protecting organizations’ data stores in a period of increasing data instability. The company’s agent-less technology automates the discovery and classification of sensitive data across known and unknown cloud-native data stores. Polar automatically creates a complete data inventory, differentiating between actual and potential data flows to see and preempt every data security and compliance risk.
“As basic as it seems, many companies don’t know where their data stores are, what’s inside that data, and where that data is going,” said Kobi Samboursky, founder and managing partner at Glilot Capital Partners. “This is what excites us about Polar Security. By ensuring data stores are secured as well as in compliance with the company’s regulatory policies as soon as they are created, Polar’s technology will become a foundational piece of every CISO’s toolkit moving forward.”
There has been an increased focus on cloud technology in recent years, as many companies have been forced to migrate their data online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Cloud consumption is a trillions-of-dollars market, and it keeps exponentially growing, every year. People are moving to the cloud. The major cloud providers are building data centers globally, and everyone is moving their infrastructures to the cloud,” said Neta Rozy, CTO and cofounder of Parametrix Insurance. “With COVID, everyone was sort of forced to move to the cloud faster than they planned originally, so cloud consumption and reliance on third-party software skyrocketed.”