California-based data security startup Cyral emerged from stealth mode this week and announced that it has raised $11 million in a Series A funding round. The company previously received $4.1 million in an angel investment round, which brings the total raised to date to over $15 million.
Cyral provides a cloud-native service designed to make it easy for organizations to monitor their systems and enforce policies across the data endpoints utilized by services, applications and users, both in the cloud and on premises.
The goal is to provide comprehensive access control and defense against threats such as password spraying, credentials inadvertently exposed in code or configuration files, SQL injection attacks, reconnaissance operations, account hijacking, and logging vulnerabilities.
Cyral claims its service intercepts requests to data endpoints without having a negative impact on performance. All request structures are analyzed for sensitive data access, and the platform automatically generates policies based on normal behavior. If suspicious activity is identified, Cyral can block threats and unauthorized access to data.
The Series A round announced this week was led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from A.Capital, Costanoa VC, Firebolt, SV Angel and Trifecta Capital.
Manav Mital, Cyral co-founder and CEO, told SecurityWeek that the money will mostly be invested in R&D and customer support. Mital says the company is very focused on making the service easy to use and it aims to integrate it with as many ecosystem tools as possible, including monitoring tools such as Datadog and Grafana, and identity providers like Active Directory and Okta.
The firm will also invest in a security research team whose role will be to gather intelligence and enable customers to respond to emerging threats in a timely manner.
Mital says his company’s product is currently in early access, and it’s expected to become generally available later this year, “once we have enough of an investment in integrations and support to be able to delight to any customer who signs up online.”
Cyral already has some paying customers that have deployed its service in production. The organizations that have used or tested the product range from 10-person startups to enterprises with over 2,000 employees, mainly in the financial services, health, and high-tech verticals.
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