Read the pitch deck 4 former Cisco execs used to raise $26 million to solve companies' new cybersecurity nightmare

Elisity

The way people work has become more unpredictable than ever before, and it's causing a cybersecurity headache for companies.

IT and security teams tasked with protecting companies' information used to work within a set of known parameters: Employees logged onto company devices connected to company networks located inside their offices. But now, as a growing number of companies embrace remote or hybrid work, those are no longer safe assumptions. The movement of workers between offices and their homes is creating a nightmare scenario for already-taxed security teams.

Elisity, a new startup, aims to help solve that problem. The firm announced Tuesday that it has raised $26 million in Series A funding led by Two Bear Capital and AllegisCyber Capital at an undisclosed valuation. Atlantic Bridge, which invested $7.5 million in seed funding last summer, also participated in the Series A round.

The startup's central offering is a platform for chief information security officers that keeps track of when and where employees are using an enterprise's devices, software, or web apps. The platform verifies workers' identities and uses artificial intelligence to detect behavior that seems suspicious, making it easy for security teams to revoke access and protect company data if need be.

CEO James Winebrenner told Insider that, while the pandemic accelerated the need for such a platform, the ongoing shift from on-premise servers to cloud architecture has made for "bizarre traffic patterns" that security teams struggle to address with traditional security tools.

"Before the pandemic, the data had already left the castle, so to speak — it was in the data center or the cloud," Winebrenner said. "And now, the villagers left the castle as well. So we ended up with these weird moats around nothing that mattered."

Rather than try to build firewalls around their networks, companies should focus on adopting "zero trust" security tools that verify employees' identity at every step and seek out suspicious behavior, Winebrenner said. Elisity's platform does just that.

"What we're doing is saying, look, identity is critical. We need to understand the identity of users, applications, data, and devices, and we want to do that regardless of where they exist," he added.

Led primarily by alums of the network and security giant Cisco, Elisity has experience in network architecture. The Silicon Valley startup was founded in 2020 by chief product officer Burjiz Pithawala, chief architect Sundher Narayan, and vice president of engineering Srinivas Sardar, all of whom previously held leadership roles at Cisco. Winebrenner was also a sales VP at the network startup Viptela before and after it was acquired by Cisco in 2017. 

"There is a lot of Cisco DNA in the team," he said, adding that the idea for Elisity's product came about from "an evolution of the conversations we were having with customers" around network security.

Elisity will use the Series A funding to invest in marketing and sales as it aims to grow its customer base, Winebrenner said. He sees the startup's competition as traditional businesses — like Cisco — that sell "siloed" network and security solutions separately, while Elisity will try to win over customers to its platform that combines the two services.

Read the pitch deck that Elisity used to win over investors for its Series A funding round:

See Also:

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