Grip Security raises $41M to help enterprises manage their SaaS identity risk – TechCrunch

Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images

Grip Security, which provides businesses with the tools to protect their SaaS applications and describes itself as the “industry’s first SaaS security control plane,” today announced that it has raised a $41 million Series B funding round led by Third Point Ventures. Previous investors YL Ventures, Intel Capital and The Syndicate Group also participated in this round, which brings Grip’s total funding to $66 million.

Since launching in 2021, the company has sharpened its messaging a bit to focus a bit more on its capabilities to reduce SaaS identity risk, something that’s top of mind for a lot of enterprises. The number of SaaS tools and cloud accounts in use at most businesses continues to increase, after all, and not all of these are under the auspice of IT and security departments. Grip argues that its tool allows these teams to get a precise overview of which tools employees are actually using — and displays that and then allows them to safely manage user access to them.

“The two biggest challenges today for almost every security organization is SaaS and identity and the intertwining between them,” Lior Yaari, Grips’s CEO and co-founder, told me. “When employees sign up to SaaS applications, they create an identity for the organization. They create identities online that the security team has responsibility for but has no control over when or how they’re created. So we give them the visibility and the automation to reduce this step. Currently, they can either pay by risk, by not doing anything — they can pay the time, by manually going through it — or they can pay in technology spend and use automation in order to consolidate risk.”

Grip says it saw its bookings grow over 400% over the past year, with a number of Fortune 500 companies now using its service. The company itself also tripled its employee roster and increased its go-to-market efforts, especially in the United States. That’s also where Grip will deploy much of the new capital, as it looks to expand its go-to-market team, as well as its R&D efforts in both its home base in Israel and the United States.

“There’s two main missions that we need the money for. One, we need to grow our go-to-market, because we have the foundation and we have the product that would allow us to sell more — but we need to build a team that can execute on it. I’m expecting significant growth in the US,” Yaari said when I asked him about how he planned to use the new funding. “The second thing is that we need to expand our offerings and product lines — so we need to hire additional engineers so we can solve bigger and better problems for customers.”

The company also plans to expand into new geographic regions as demand for SaaS security solutions increases across the globe.

“We want to be an integral part of the identity fabric, especially SaaS identities and as this problem space grows, we’re building solutions to help reduce identity risk,” Yaari said.

Among the new capabilities the company plans to launch soon is a feature that would allow businesses to enforce the use of multi-factor authentication across SaaS products. Yaari noted that for a lot of companies, that’s one of the biggest compliance challenges right now.

“The true key to Grip’s success is their unique capacity to meet this problem head-on with unparalleled innovation, robust technology that meets the needs of the largest enterprises in the world, and a go-to-market strategy that’s securing major customers,” said Ofer Schreiber, senior partner at YL Ventures. “It’s been incredible to be a part of Grip’s journey since we led their seed round and we are excited to continue supporting Grip as they become the leader in SaaS security.”