Britive, which helps secure public clouds, lands $20.5M investment – TechCrunch

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Proving that there’s still plenty of venture money in cybersecurity, cloud identity security platform Britive today announced that it raised $20.5 million in a Series B funding round. Led by Pelion Venture Partners with participation from Liberty Global Ventures, Crosslink Capital and One Way Ventures, the new brings Britive’s total raised to $36 million.

CEO Art Poghosyan says that it’ll be put toward expanding the company’s investments in customer successes, marketing and sales, as well as product development.

“Ironically, the pandemic affected Britive’s business more positively than not,” Poghosyan told TechCrunch in an email interview. “It accelerated the move to virtualizing work environments and transition from data center to cloud.”

There’s truth to that. According to a 2022 survey from Equinix, 71% of IT decision-makers plan to move more functions to the cloud over the next 12 months. The cloud has plenty of upsides, among them scalability and accessibility. But there are drawbacks, too — one being security (potentially). A poll from the Cloud Security Alliance reveals that close to one-third of businesses using a public cloud provider experienced security issues within the past two years, including unauthorized apps and poorly configured APIs.

Poghosyan says that Britive was built to address those cloud security concerns — particularly on the identity and access management (IAM) side. Founded in 2018, the startup’s platform generates access privileges — including tokens and keys — on demand for people and software accessing cloud services and apps.

“Our tech automatically expires and removes privileges when not in use to ensure the cloud keys and tokens are not exposed to attacks around the clock,” Poghosyan said. “Britive’s offering allows development teams to continue building at cloud speed while security teams maintain full visibility and control over cloud identities and privileges.

Britive is far from the only player in the vast and growing IAM market, though. There’s well-capitalized ventures like Saviynt, whose platform enables companies to secure apps, data and infrastructure in a single platform. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo paid billions to acquire identity access management startups SailPoint, Ping Identity and ForgeRock. On the less grandiose end of the spectrum, there are ventures like ConductorOne, which aims to bring automation to identity and access management.

Poghosyan asserts that Britive’s anomaly-spotting AI differentiates it from the others out there. Using AI, Britive analyzes cloud user activity logs in near-real time and attempts to identify behavioral patterns that could be dangerous or unauthorized. The platform then alerts the relevant security teams, giving them the option to quickly terminate any potentially problematic sessions.

TechCrunch can’t speak to Britive’s efficacy. But the company’s growth suggests there’s something there. Poghosyan says that annual recurring revenue is in the “millions” of dollars and growing 3x annually, and that Britive now has “dozens” of customers, including several Fortune 500 brands.

“Our platform manages thousands of daily active privileged identities who interact with critical business applications and infrastructure hosted on major cloud platforms,” Poghosyan added. “Even in a broader climate of economic slowdown, enterprise organizations continue to invest in future-proofing their cloud infrastructure and security solutions stack, which Britive is an essential part of.”

Britive, which currently has about 55 employees, expects to add 10 to 20 staffers by the end of the year, Poghosyan said.