N.B.’s Sonrai Security Completes $20-Million VC Funding Round
FREDERICTON – Cloud security company Sonrai Security, which is based out of Fredericton and New York, announced Thursday that it has secured $20-million (U.S.) in series B funding in a round led by Menlo Ventures with full participation from founding investor Polaris Partners and Series A lead investor Ten Eleven Ventures.
The new funding, which brings the total raised to $38-million, will be used to accelerate research and development along with global sales and marketing activities for Sonrai Dig, the company’s industry-leading identity and data governance platform, which is currently used by a growing number of global enterprise organizations.
“The shift to the cloud is inevitable. And with that shift, cloud identity and data governance become primary concerns,” said Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures, in a release.
“As enterprises move first to one cloud, and later to multiple clouds, the problems around access/privilege management, configuration drift, and sensitive data loss become increasingly complex. Drawing on a proven team with strong domain expertise, Sonrai built an incredible solution that wins over sophisticated cloud and security buyers. We’ve bet on this team before and are proud to back them a second time.”
Sonrai Security is co-founded by Brendan Hannigan and Sandy Bird. Bird co-founded Q1 Labs and Hannigan served as its CEO. The company was acquired in 2011 by IBM, making it one of the biggest exits in New Brunswick’s history. The two men joined IBM following its acquisition.
Bird and Hannigan founded Sonrai Security when they decided to take a break from IBM. The startup focuses on cloud data control and helps businesses and large enterprises securely house their data centres on cloud-based platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and more.
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The Sonrai Dig platform automatically uncovers identity, data and cloud platform risks, automatically eliminates these risks and continuously monitors to ensure new risks and unusual activity are quickly identified.
It builds a comprehensive graph detailing every relationship between identities (people and non-people) and data that exist within cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes. DevOps-specific workflows represented graphically as swimlanes enable easy escalations, certifications and risk-exception handling and provide role-based access control for development, security, cloud and audit teams, to ensure adherence to policy.
“The increasing frequency of cloud breaches caused by identity and data access complexity has driven significant traction for our Sonrai Dig platform among large enterprises, who see it as the basis of their cloud security model,” said Brendan Hannigan, Sonrai’s CEO and co-founder. “We are extremely pleased to partner with Menlo Ventures, whose long experience in this space will help us rapidly accelerate our expansion.”
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