Security automation startup Veriti launches out of stealth with $18.5M

Veriti, a platform for unifying cybersecurity infrastructure, today emerged from stealth with $18.5 million in funding, a combination of $12 million from Insight Partners and a $6.5 million round led by NFX and Amiti. According to CEO Adi Ikan, the newly announced capital is being put toward scaling Veriti's business operations and developing its product suite.

Veriti's launch comes as VCs continue to show enthusiasm for cybersecurity startups despite the generally unfavorable funding climate. According to PitchBook data, venture capital investments in the security sector this year eclipsed $13.66 billion -- up from $11.47 billion in 2020. And the global cybersecurity market is projected to be worth over $500 billion by 2030.

Founded in 2021 by Ikan and Oren Koren -- both ex-Check Point executives -- Veriti integrates with a company's existing security stack to evaluate risk posture by analyzing security configurations, logs, sensor telemetries and threat intelligence feeds. The platform taps AI to identify which events might be impacting business uptime and present the root cause, as well as which security policy improvements need to be taken to remediate the impacts.

"Enterprise security posture is usually sub-optimal. This is due to many reasons, including tool sprawl, increased complexity, massive amounts of data and limited resources," Koren told TechCrunch in an email interview. "This is what inspired us to build Veriti’s platform -- to address these complexities and help IT and security stay on top of this challenge."

Koren makes the case that Veriti can augment security teams' efforts in spotting security gaps, ultimately reducing the time spent on monitoring and maintenance tasks. The growing number of security solutions in organizations can introduce complexity because each solution has its own functions and tools to learn, he argues, while the volume of alerts issued by the solutions end up creating murky visibility into the actual security posture.

Koren isn't exactly an unbiased source. But he's not the only one who's observed these troubling trends in enterprise security. One recent survey of over 800 IT professionals found that almost 60% were receiving over 500 cloud security alerts per day, and that the alert fatigue created by the volume caused 55% to miss critical alerts on either a daily or weekly basis.

"While affording more expansive security capabilities, the proliferation of security solutions creates room for misconfigurations that can result in inadvertent security gaps and adversely impact the business by blocking legitimate applications and users," Ikan said via email. "IT and security leadership today have a poor idea of the true utilization of security investments and of the effective security posture of their organizations."

Veriti's challenge will be demonstrating that its approach is superior to the other security posture-analyzing platforms on the market. Rival vendor Secureframe provides a service that integrates with cloud providers and apps to understand its customers’ security postures. Hunters, another competitor, aims to automate the threat-hunting process by taking in data from networking and security tools to detect stealth attacks.

It's very early days for Veriti -- Koren wouldn't reveal the size of the company's customer base or current revenue. But he's betting that Veriti's tech expertise will help it stand out from the pack. "By leveraging modern techniques like machine learning, focusing on automation, we aim to provide a way for modern teams to maximize security posture while minimizing issues that impact business uptime," he said.

As the idiom goes: time will tell.