Sydney-founded cloud security startup Kivera has raised $5.1 million in a fresh seed round from US and Canadian investors as it looks to deep its roots in the North American market.
The raise led by Canada’s Round 13 Capital, an existing backer, and New York cybersecurity investor General Advance. Senior executives from Amazon, Google, Shift5, ServiceNow, and Zscaler are among the angel investors backing the 3-year-old business, as well as JP Morgan & Chase head of cloud security Srinath Kuruvadi, SentinelOne’s Ely Kahn, and BigID founder Dimitri SirotaBigID.
Having already relocated its HQ to New York, Kivera will put the fresh capital towards recruitment as it expands across North America. Last month the business recruited Joe Lea, former president of US fleet logistics startup Shift5, as its new CEO.
Cofounders Neil Brown and Vernon Jefferson launched Kivera in 2020, having developed the idea during their time at tech consultancy firm Sourced Group.
Round 13 Capital tipped in C$2.5 million (A$2.85m) into the idea in late 2020 to spin out the startup, which opened with Australian clients and offices in Sydney and Toronto, counting former Sourced CEO Jonathan Spinks as part of the OG team.
Kivera supports major cloud providers, including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and MSFT Azure. The platform offers capabilities across cloud protection, securing cloud data, simplified compliance, enabling cloud agility and granular cloud visibility.
Brown said Kivera lets developers choose the best orchestration tool for the job, native or otherwise, without constant alerts.
“Cloud security teams are swamped in a backlog of alerts, and they deserve to get out of triage mode and take control of their cloud security by preventing risk up front,” he said.
“When dealing with sensitive workloads, the consequences of a single mistake, such as accidentally exposing a resource to the internet, can be considerable. Our recent funding is an endorsement that Kivera is tapping into specific customer pain. We’re eager to change the way that cybersecurity teams think about cloud security beginning at the configuration level.”
Investor Ely Kahn, VP of product at SentinelOne, and a former head of product for AWS Security Hub agreed that security teams using cloud security tools are swamped in a backlog of misconfiguration detections.
“Kivera’s Cloud Security Protection Platform is poised to flip this paradigm and start moving customers from a detective to a preventative security posture by preventing these misconfigurations from happening in the first place,” he said.
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