SecurEnds raises $21M to manage risk and compliance

Identity governance platform SecurEnds today announced that it closed a $21 million series A funding round led by Elephant. The company says that the proceeds will be put toward expanding its sales, marketing, and engineering teams both in the U.S. and internationally and introducing new features including out-of-the-box connectors and improved machine learning algorithms for identity risk and analytics.

With their assets now spread between on-premises and cloud deployments, organizations are accelerating their digital roadmaps. There is increasing demand for software-as-a-service-based products that allow them to achieve access certifications while undergoing a transformation. That’s perhaps why the global risk management market was valued at $6.25 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach $18.5 billion by 2026, according to Allied Market Research.

SecurEnds aim to deliver this by automating workloads including user access reviews, entitlement audits, access requests, and segregation of duty. Tippu Gagguturu and Deven Reddy founded it in 2017, spurred by the growing market need to better address identity risk and compliance without the monotonous processes that have historically accompanied it.

“SecurEnds is helping automate the complex compliance process,” Gagguturu told VentureBeat via email. “Our platform ingests data from [a] target company’s applications and verifies that all compliance standards are met, allowing our customer to have a more holistic view of risk within [their organization].”

Big data analytics

SecurEnds, which competes with companies like SailPoint and Saviynt, seeks to make it easier for organizations to comply with regulations including SOX, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR, and ISO 27001. Each has access requirements associated with it, for example making sure the right resources have access to the right data, which can make implementation challenging from a governance and risk management standpoint.

SecurEnds loads employee data from human resources management systems using built-in connectors and files. Admins can extract identities from across enterprise applications, databases, and cloud apps.

Above: SecurEnds’ dashboard.

Image Credit: SecurEnds

One of the tasks that the SecurEnds platform performs is segregation of duty, which helps prevent fraud by requiring more than one person to complete certain items. According to Gagguturu, one of the startup’s customers, a “top 5” commercial bank, uses it to mitigate risk on their merger and acquisition deals.

SecurEnds broadly applies AI and machine learning to its workflows, leveraging analytics to highlight anomalies like overprovisioned accounts (i.e., people have access to more applications than they should). The platform’s AI currently only identifies basic outliers — for example, accounts payable having access to accounts receivable-specific applications or instances — but Gagguturu says that its models are improving “significantly” as its customer base grows.

“SecurEnds has close to 100 customers and each customer has anywhere from 1,000 to 30,000 users. Primary users within organizations are chief information security officer (CISOs),” Gagguturu said. “While we do not disclose annual recurring revenue as a private company, we are currently projecting more than 300% year-over-year revenue growth at the end of the 2021.”

SecurEnds, which is based in Atlanta, Georgia, currently employs 60 people. The company intends to hire 125 more in the U.S., India, and Europe by the end of the year.