Armis, a Palo Alto-based company that aims to help organizations eliminate the blind spots introduced by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday.
There is an increasing number of IoT devices in the world and a study conducted by Armis showed that businesses are unaware of 40 percent of the devices connected to their environment. This limited visibility can expose their network to malware attacks, breaches and data loss.
Armis wants to address this problem with an agentless IoT security platform that allows enterprises to see and control all the devices and networks used to access their systems.
Founded in late 2015, Armis emerged from stealth with $17 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital. Other investors include Zohar Zisapel, founder and chairman of RAD Technologies, René Bonvanie, CMO of Palo Alto Networks, and Mickey Boodaei, founder of Imperva and Trusteer.
Armis has its roots in Israel, where its founders, CEO Yevgeny Dibrov and CTO Nadir Izrael, served in Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defense Forces. Dibrov was on the executive team at Adallom, a cloud security startup acquired by Microsoft in 2015. Armis is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, but also has an office in Tel Aviv.
“Enterprise security has a huge blind spot,” said Dibrov. “The recent botnet attacks like Mirai, Hajime, and Persirai show how new IoT devices are being exploited and attacked. The fact is you cannot put an agent on most of the devices in an organization today, which means we need a new approach. We built Armis to give enterprises complete visibility into all devices in their environment without requiring an agent. We can stop devices from compromising corporate assets, regardless of whether those devices are managed by IT.”
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