Cloud security start-up with Irish co-founder bags $20m funding

16 Oct 2020

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Sonrai Security, a US cloud security start-up co-founded and led by Brendan Hannigan, has raised $20m in Series B funding.

A start-up led by former president and CEO of Q1 Labs, Brendan Hannigan, has continued to raise capital with a new Series B round worth $20m. New-York based Sonrai Security said the round was led by Menlo Ventures with full participation from founding investor Polaris Partners and Series A lead investor Ten Eleven Ventures.

This brings the public cloud security company’s total funding to $38m. It plans to use the new funding to accelerate its product research and development as well as global sales and marketing activities for Sonrai Dig, the company’s identity and data governance platform.

The platform automatically uncovers identity, data and cloud platform risks. It also continuously monitors to ensure new risks and unusual activity are quickly identified.

“The increasing frequency of cloud breaches caused by identity and data access complexity has driven significant traction for our Sonrai Dig platform among large enterprises, who see it as the basis of their cloud security model,” said Irishman Hannigan, who is CEO and co-founder of Sonrai Security.

“We are extremely pleased to partner with Menlo Ventures, whose long experience in this space will help us rapidly accelerate our expansion.”

‘Inevitable’ shift to cloud

Commenting on the investment, Menlo Ventures partner Venky Ganesan said with the “inevitable” shift to the cloud, cloud identity and data governance are now “primary concerns”.

“As enterprises move first to one cloud, and later to multiple clouds, the problems around access [and] privilege management, configuration drift, and sensitive data loss become increasingly complex,” he said.

“Drawing on a proven team with strong domain expertise, Sonrai built an incredible solution that wins over sophisticated cloud and security buyers. We’ve bet on this team before and are proud to back them a second time.”

In 2011, Hannigan’s security intelligence software company Q1 Labs was acquired by IBM and he was appointed as the head of its security division. In 2017, he established Sonrai Security in stealth mode with business partner Sandy Bird, and the platform officially launched last year.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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