New investment will accelerate growth and expansion of SaaS identity hygiene platform
SPHERE Technology Solutions (SPHERE), a leader in identity hygiene, announced today a $31 million Series B investment led by Edison Partners, a Princeton-based leading growth equity firm, with participation from existing investor Forgepoint Capital. As part of the transaction, Edison General Partner Lenard Marcus will join SPHERE’s board of directors.
As cyberattacks escalate in number and severity, Identity Hygiene has become foundational to enterprise security, digital transformation, and mandatory compliance. The increasing needs around ensuring identities have access to only the required resources has been in direct response to the rise in ransomware attacks and bad actors who take advantage of wide open and mismanaged access.
SPHERE immediately shrinks the attack surface of these threats through an automated platform that provides visibility and remediation of identity hygiene risks along with tech-enabled managed services, delivering expertise to accelerate these crucial programs. SPHERE’s current customers are some of the largest and most highly regulated organizations globally, ranging from financial institutions to healthcare providers and more. With this investment, SPHERE will expand its SaaS offering, channel ecosystem and alliances, and sales and marketing to accelerate growth.
“As a company founded and operated by a team of security practitioners, we developed a mission-critical solution well before the market even deemed it mission-critical,” said Rita Gurevich, founder and CEO of SPHERE. “We’ve experienced the problems that our customers encounter firsthand, and understand the time, dedication, and resources it takes to solve the complex issues they face every day. We’re thrilled to have the support of Edison Partners and Forgepoint Capital for our next chapter of growth.”
For over 13 years, SPHERE has enabled IT and Security teams to adopt a Zero Trust model by finding and fixing any type of identity access issue across any resource—in a fraction of the time these complex capabilities would take manually. The platform SPHEREboard provides an end-to-end workflow for end-user and privileged account controls, across cloud and on-premises systems and infrastructure, remediates open, excessive and inappropriate access, and provides an evergreen path for sustainability.
“Identity management, and more broadly information security, starts with the ability to ensure that the only parties with access to sensitive or operational data are those identified by management,” said Marcus. “SPHERE’s platform enables enterprises to improve their identity hygiene and maintain compliance. Its managed services offerings enable it to service the mid-market and large enterprises, where the problem is pervasive. Edison Partners is also proud to support female trailblazers like Rita Gurevich, who are closing the gender diversity gap in a historically male-dominated industry.”
SPHERE continues to build significant traction and earn industry accolades that recognize the company’s growth, leadership and commitment to diversity, a source of passion for Gurevich ever since she began building the company from the ground up. SPHERE was honored as a Gold Winner in the 2022 Globee Cyber Security Excellence Awards, named a finalist in the annual SINET 16 Awards, and selected by the Timmy Awards for Best Tech Workplace for Diversity in New York. A proven leader and innovator in cybersecurity, Gurevich was named by SC Magazine as a top “Women to Watch” in 2022. She was also selected as the only female finalist for the SC Awards “Security Executive of the Year.”
“Our focus is to invest in the most innovative cybersecurity companies and SPHERE’s combination of automation and expertise is unmatched in the industry,” said Forgepoint Capital Managing Director Don Dixon. “Major corporations including many of the world’s leading financial institutions rely on Sphere for its ability to effectively address two critical use cases – Zero trust initiatives and regulatory requirements for identity entitlements. We’re excited to continue our partnership and to welcome Lenard and Edison to the board of directors.”
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