Israeli startup Gem Security has raised $11 million from a seed funding round as it rolls out its integrated technology platform to help businesses and large organizations detect and respond swiftly to cyberattacks on their cloud-based services.
The seed funding round was led by Israel’s Team8, which creates and invests in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and big data startups. It comes just nine months after the cybersecurity startup was founded by a team of security industry veterans: Arie Zilberstein, who serves as CEO; Ron Konigsberg as CTO; and Ofir Brukner, Vice-President of Product. The three graduated together from Israel’s military elite technology Unit 8200.
The startup says it has built an automated cloud threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) platform, which can identify activity from malicious actors, unauthorized access and attacks, data breaches and other cyber incidents in real time, and has a fast response system to threats to mitigate damage.
“Most cloud security solutions focus on building a wall that is as tall as possible to make sure the bad guys stay out. That sounds good in theory. In practice, however, no wall is ever going to be tall enough,” Zilberstein said. “We offer a more realistic approach, starting from the fact that cloud environments are and will remain imperfect. If it’s perfect, it’s only for five minutes, and then it’s going to be imperfect again.”
“Minimizing the potential for intrusion is only half the story. When someone jumps over the wall, we don’t just raise an alarm,” he explained.
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Zilberstein said Gem’s platform provides security teams with a comprehensive tool to find and stop the intruder, automating the incident response and ensuring there is no escalation.
“Where others end, we begin,” he said.
Gem developed the platform after consulting with over 200 information security managers working in the world’s leading organizations to provide streamlined cyber threat solutions as companies and organizations are using more than one cloud provider. Over the last 18 months,79% of companies have experienced at least one cloud data breach with 43% of companies reporting ten or more, Gem said citing a report by Gartner.
“Cloud migration brings new opportunities to enterprises, but also entails quite a few challenges and risk, including the need to adapt existing solutions to the new cloud infrastructure,” said Nadav Zafrir, Managing Partner at Team8 and former head of Israel’s Unit 8200. “Gem’s unique platform offers a first-of-its-kind solution to deal with the inevitable attacks on cloud environments, and is based on an intuitive, automatic and efficient approach that allows organizations to identify cloud security events in real time…and enable isolation of the threat.”
Gem, which has 20 employees spread across its two offices in Tel Aviv and New York, expects to double the size of its staff to about 40 employees by the end of 2023.
Founders Zilberstein and Brukner previously worked together at Sygnia, a cybersecurity startup, which helps organizations to investigate and contain high-profile security cyber breaches. Sygnia was acquired by Singapore’s governmental holding company Temasek in 2018.
Gem’s customers include global companies ranging from mid-market to Fortune 500 companies in a variety of fields such as banks, fintech companies, digital health companies and retail companies in the US and Europe.