Fredericton Cloud Security Company Secures $50-Million Investment
FREDERICTON – New Brunswick cloud security company Sonrai Security has secured $50-million in Series C funding following a round led by ISTARI and further backing from its existing investors Polaris Partners, Menlo Ventures, TenEleven Ventures and the New Brunswick Innovation Fund.
The Series C round brings the total capital raised by Sonrai to $88-million in just under three years.
With offices in both Fredericton and New York, Sonrai delivers enterprise cloud security for companies running on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. In an announcement last week, the company said it plans to use the new funding to accelerate research and development and expand sales and marketing globally for its industry-leading cloud security platform.
“We are building our portfolio based around our clients’ most pressing cybersecurity needs. Cloud security is one of their key focus areas and Sonrai’s best of breed platform is the perfect complement to our portfolio,” said Amit Jasuja, Chief Portfolio Officer with ISTARI.
The Singapore-based investment company helps harness the power of leading cybersecurity companies, experts and knowledge to help its clients become more digitally resilient.
Jasuja, who will join Sonrai Security’s board of directors, says ISTARI will “aim to be an accelerator for Sonrai’s growth journey,” while helping its clients further uncover and reduce risks.
Sonrai Security was co-founded by Brendan Hannigan and Sandy Bird. Prior to that, Bird had co-founded Q1 Labs with Hannigan previously serving as its CEO.
Q1 Labs was acquired by IBM in 2011, with both joining the company following the acquisition.
Both Bird and Hannigan later founded Sonrai Security as a startup to focus on cloud data control and helping businesses and larger enterprises securely house their data centres on cloud-based platforms.
Sonrai’s website highlights the explosion in public cloud use for larger enterprises and the need for security solutions. “Ninety percent of Sonrai Security customers deployed have found unintended and mistaken data exposure in their public cloud,” it says, while as of 2020, 83 percent of workloads reside in a public cloud space.
A further outlook on the reliance of companies employing cloud setups shows noteworthy hints from a recent study from Gartner Research predicting that, “through 2025, more than 99 percent of cloud breaches will have a root cause of customer misconfigurations or mistakes,” and that, “by 2024, organizations running cloud infrastructure services will suffer a minimum of 2,300 violations of least privilege policies, per account, every year.”
“Securing identities and data is central to Sonrai Security’s approach for protecting enterprise AWS, Azure and GCP cloud infrastructures,” said Hannigan, CEO and co-founder of Sonrai Security, in the company’s announcement.
Hannigan adds large enterprises have embraced this approach, saying “our latest funding round supports our global expansion and ensures that our platform will continue to provide the most advanced multi-cloud security capabilities available in the market. ISTARI’s unique value proposition of capital, global client relationships, and thought leadership will be a catalyst for our business.”