Founded by Unit 8200 veterans and four-time Google Capture the Flag champions, the firm will enable data protection teams to move at the speed of cloud
Laminar, a public cloud data protection provider, today emerged from stealth with a $32 million Series A investment, bringing the company’s total funding to $37 million. The round was led by New York-based global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, with participation from SentinelOne (NYSE: S), TLV Partners and Meron Capital. Founded by Unit 8200 veterans, four-time Google Capture the Flag champions and lifelong friends Amit Shaked, CEO, and Oran Avraham, CTO, Laminar delivers agentless and asynchronous data security and leakage protection for everything you build and run in the cloud.
The Funding
According to Crunchbase, cyber companies in Israel have raised about $1.6 billion to date this year, well above last year’s record of $1 billion. Laminar’s Series A, which also included investments by cybersecurity founders and Fortune 500 CISOs, is one of the largest A rounds for an Israeli security startup with founders under 30 years of age. Laminar will utilize this round of funding to expand its engineering department, build-out its go-to-market team and establish a world-class data security research team.
“With its game-changing security platform, Laminar is bringing about the democratization of data in today’s fast-paced cloud world,” said Emmet B. Keeffe III, founder, Insight IGNITE and operating partner, Insight Partners. “At the end of the day, security is about protecting data—and today’s data protection teams are unable to keep up. We’re excited to partner with Laminar to capitalize on this immense opportunity and turn CISOs and data security teams into true business enablers.”
“Data and APIs are mission critical in the functioning of today’s digital society,” said Tomer Weingarten, CEO, SentinelOne. “Securing data wherever it resides is the foundation of our Singularity XDR platform — we see Laminar’s approach as complementary in helping our customers secure data in a cloud-first world.”
The Technology
With important product validation by hundreds of CISOs over the last year through Insight IGNITE, Laminar is an industry-first public cloud data protection solution that prevents data leakage from everything that you build and run in the cloud.
Built specifically for CISOs and data protection teams, Laminar’s Cloud Data Security Platform is the only tool on the market that allows them to:
- Discover and Classify sensitive data continuously for complete visibility
- Secure and Control to improve risk posture
- Detect and Remediate leaks without interrupting data flow
The challenge is how to do this simply and without friction. Legacy solutions require agents or filter traffic through proxies. Laminar has chosen cloud-native approaches that are agentless and asynchronous to have no impact on performance or data flow. Laminar provides continuous monitoring of both managed and unmanaged datastores, compute as well as data egress channels, allowing sanctioned data movements and alerting when something’s wrong. This cloud-native approach allows complete, autonomous data observability, including within shadow datastores. With Laminar, data protection teams can reduce the attack surface and detect real-time data leaks.
“As organizations rapidly transition to the cloud and build applications cloud-first, businesses are moving at record pace. These transformations often make life easier. However, for CISOs and data security professionals, their job is more difficult than ever before, and data protection teams are left in the dark,” said Shaked.
“Data protection teams are blind to where sensitive data resides in the cloud, and legacy data protection solutions are no longer keeping pace with evolving cloud environments,” said Josh Jaffe, president of the Global Center for Cybersecurity and longtime Fortune 500 CISO. “Laminar is launching at a time when these teams are in desperate need of cloud-native data security platforms purpose built for cloud environments.”
“We’ve already built a truly world-class team of both offensive and defensive security engineers, and I’m proud to be working with and recruiting some of the best in the world. Part of the joy of working at Laminar is being side-by-side with these amazing individuals. I’m excited to continue to build-out an elite team of engineers and researchers that will help enable our customers to detect and prevent some of the most sophisticated attacks,” said Avraham.
The Founders
The launch and funding would not be possible without Laminar’s expert founders. Shaked and Avraham met in high school at 14 and vowed to one day launch a security company together. At just 17, Avraham identified the first iPhone 3G baseband vulnerability
Shaked and Avraham both served in Unit 8200, an Israeli Intelligence Corps unit of the Israel Defense Forces, focused on collecting signal intelligence and code decryption. While in the military, Shaked also earned a master’s degree in AI and deep learning.
Following Unit 8200, Shaked went to a late-stage startup called Magic Leap, and Avraham joined a newly launched company Medigate — giving them valuable internal security experience. Avraham also led a team of renowned offensive security experts to win four out of the last six Google Capture the Flag competitions.
“We are friends first and business partners second — and hope this will come through as we build out our diverse and talented team,” said Shaked and Avraham. “We are thrilled to see our hard work coming to life with the launch of Laminar.”
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