Oleria, a Seattle startup helping companies manage employee access to applications and data, raised $33.1 million in a Series A round.
GeekWire previously reported on the funding after we spotted an SEC filing. The company is now providing more details about the cash and growth plans, including the tripling of its 20-person team over the next year.
Oleria emerged from stealth mode last year with software designed to help companies prevent and respond to breaches in an ever-changing cybersecurity landscape. The idea is to automate many security-related tasks and make it easier to get a handle on internal access to back-end systems, many of which are convoluted with legacy software and manual administration.
“Visibility into who has access to what, how they got it, and what they are doing with it is becoming an even more important and challenging issue,” said Oleria CEO Jim Alkove.
Oleria is targeting enterprises with 1,000 employees or more. It has onboarded initial paying customers and plans to make its product generally available in the coming months.
Alkove said AI is both helping companies better understand the state of access and detect threats, but also will increase risks as hackers use the technology to find new ways to infiltrate systems.
“We have only seen the tip of the iceberg regarding the potential impact of AI on security,” he said.
Alkove is a former chief trust officer at Salesforce and a former advisor for the World Economic Forum’s Global Center for Cybersecurity. Oleria co-founder Jagadeesh Kunda is the former chief product officer at Colorado-based cloud directory platform JumpCloud. Kunda also held engineering leadership roles at Salesforce, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
Salesforce Ventures, the company’s VC arm, is an investor in Oleria. Evolution Equity Partners led the Series A round. Other backers include Tapestry VC, and Zscaler. Total funding is more than $40 million to date.
“Oleria is bringing cybersecurity into the future and keeping pace with the changing landscape by fulfilling a critical, unmet need in identity security,” Taher Elgamal, partner at Evolution and former CTO of security at Salesforce, said in a statement.
Elgamal and former Mandiant COO John Watters will join the company’s board.
