Guardicore raises $60 million to protect cloud workloads from attackers

Guardicore, a Tel Aviv-based company developing workload protection solutions for data centers and public clouds, today announced that it’s raised $60 million in series C funding, bringing its total raised to $110 million. New investor Qumra Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures, 83North, TPG Growth, and Greenfield Partners and new investors DTCP, Partech, and Access Industries’ ClalTech.

CEO and cofounder Pavel Gurvich said that the fresh funds will be used to fuel continued growth and to accelerate investments in sales, marketing, and customer service.

“Any organization has critical IT assets that need to be secured,” he said. “Our distributed, software-defined segmentation solution is the simplest way to secure these assets whether they reside in the cloud or on premises. The days of being chained to legacy firewalls are over.”

For the uninitiated, Guardicore’s Centra security platform — whose users include Frontier Airlines, Santander, Optimal+, Openlink, Intermountain Healthcare, and Cellcom — runs atop instances in Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud Platform, VMWare, and other cloud providers and creates a visual map of all app workloads “down to the process level,” containerized or otherwise. Additionally, it enables dev teams to create and enforce policies across nodes or whole environments with workflows that map dependencies.

Centra automatically correlates network and process-level activity and can inspect app behavior while automatically importing orchestration metadata to generate asset labels. Moreover, the suite can control communications at the process and pod level on Windows and Linux. And in the event of an attack, Centra is able to isolate suspicious domain names, IP addresses, and file hashes and suggest remediation steps, plus engage with attackers with dynamic deception; optionally export indicators of compromise (IOCs) to security gateways; and trigger virtual machine suspends, halts, disconnects, and snapshots.

Gurvich says that Centra is currently protecting datacenters in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, principally for clients in finance, health care, and retail. He characterized the company’s revenue growth as “consistent,” and said that it’s nabbed “numerous” new Fortune 500 subscribers since its last funding round.

“Since our last round of funding, we have successfully been able to articulate our vision and demonstrate that the market is ripe for disruption. [W]e have proven that our product is more intuitive, flexible, and makes security easier to apply than traditional firewall technology currently being used to protect internal and cloud infrastructure,” added Gurvich. “We are displacing incumbent players and newcomers alike as we strive to help our enterprise customers quickly secure their business-critical applications and data, reduce the cost and burden of compliance, and secure cloud adoption.”

As part of the round, Segterra executive chair Ram Metser joined Guardicore’s board of directors.

“Guardicore is changing the way enterprises approach data center security with modern segmentation capabilities that overcome the inherent inefficiencies of traditional techniques and results in stronger security for enterprise environments,” said Qumra Capital managing general partner Boaz Dinte. “Guardicore is disrupting the market and is well positioned to capitalize on the broader opportunities this presents. We were compelled to invest as the lead in this round because we believe Guardicore will play a critical role in shaping the future of enterprise security, helping organizations better protect vital systems and data as we evolve our digital information society.”