When you get the chance to invest in three co-founders whose careers you’ve been watching with admiration, you don’t pass on the opportunity. This is especially true when three of the smartest minds in cloud and cybersecurity tackle, and succeed in, closing the most important gap that exists today in cloud security. Which is why I’m excited to share that cloud data security company, Dig Security, emerged from stealth mode with today’s announcement of its $11M seed funding, led by Team8 Capital.
Introducing DDR: Data Detection and Response
The need for data security in the cloud has become increasingly apparent as organizations shift to complex environments with dozens of data asset types across clouds. The drastic increase in data asset volume and variety has created fundamental cracks in data security. It is increasingly difficult to know where data stores reside, what data is held and to ensure that it’s not being misused. On top of this, organizations’ inability to monitor employee or machine data interactions, identify anomalies in data asset access behaviour, and comply with security, data, and privacy requirements (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA), has amplified the recent surge in data breaches and attacks. Indeed, the Team8 Cybersecurity Themes Report for 2022 listed cloud security, and data security, as two of the top seven fastest accelerating trends this year.
Dig Security is shaping the future of multi-cloud data security by providing a real-time threat detection solution for data assets hosted in public clouds. The company harnesses native cloud technologies to provide an out-of-band solution to help organizations discover, monitor, detect and govern their data through a single unified policy engine.
It is the combination of a holistic, data-centric, multi-cloud approach, which is easy to deploy, together with its Data Detection and Response (DDR) capabilities, that uniquely positions Dig to shape the future of multi-cloud data security. Dig’s DDR is the first of its kind to proactively protect data in public clouds. It records who is accessing different data sources and alerts or triggers extra protections upon suspicious or anomalous activity, stopping attacks, exfiltrations and employee or workload data misuse. Dig’s detection engines are based on deep security research. By embedding the attacker’s perspective – derived from some of the strongest talent in the Israeli ecosystem – Dig’s opinionated, out-of-the-box detection engine neutralizes attackers, without requiring enterprises to write and maintain policies.
My colleague , Charles Blauner, former Global Head of Information Security at CitiGroup and Team8’s operating partner and CISO-in-Residence said: “Enterprises are still struggling to achieve the same cybersecurity capabilities and protection of their data that they had when everything was on-prem. In addition to the ability to find and protect their data, they also need to spot compromised identities and anomalies in data asset access behavior. Further, they need to comply with security, data and privacy requirements. For the first time, Dig enables them to gain this capability on the cloud.”
Founder dream team
Dig’s founders Dan Benjamin (CEO), Gad Akuka (CTO) and Ido Azran (VP R&D) bring a rare combination of prior startup success as well as deep experience in cloud architecture and security. Dan has previously founded technology startups, worked as the CTO in residence at Google Cloud for Startups, and most recently led Microsoft’s Cloud Security Product Strategy and M&A. Gad co-founded Segasec which was acquired by Mimecast two years after launch, and Ido founded CrossSense which was acquired by Toluna.
Backing Dig Security with $11 million seed round alongside giants
I’m delighted to lead Dig’s $11 million seed round with an amazing cohort of investors. We were joined by cybersecurity firms Crowdstrike and CyberArk, as well as Merlin Ventures. Angel investors include Tom Killealea (Chairman of MongoDB), Jeff Fagnan (Carbon Black, Veracode), Nir Polak (Founder of Exabeam), Ori Fragman (CISO of Ahold) and Nitzan Shapira (Founder of Epsagon), among others.
We’ve been working in stealth with Dig for quite some time now, and are pumped by their incredible execution and the impact the solution has on its customer base. The combination of solving a real, significant problem, coupled with a truly innovative technology approach and an ambitious founding team with proven experience – is what assured us Dig is building the leader in cloud data security.