Israeli-American ID protection company Silverfort received a firm vote of confidence from a range of large global investors as the Boston-based company confirmed it has raised $116 million in fresh capital.
Allocations came from Acrew Capital, Greenfield Partners, Citi Ventures, General Motors Ventures, Maor Investments, Vintage Investment Partners and Singtel’s Innov8.
Greenwich, Conn.-based investment firm Brighton Park Capital (BPC) led the round, with participation from existing investors.
Its CEO, Mike Gregoire, who is also a founding partner and former CEO of CA Technologies and Taleo, will join Silverfort’s board of directors “as the company scales and continues its journey to transform and lead the identity security market,” the investment veteran told QA Financial.
“Silverfort is one of the rare companies that has successfully envisioned how a large market will need to transform to solve a tough problem, in this case, identity security,” Gregoire said.
The fresh investment comes after the company experienced a record year, with more than 100% growth.
Silverton added “hundreds of new enterprise customers” in 2024, including “the largest global financial services,” Gregoire pointed out.
‘Weakest link’
With its patented technology, Silverfort aims to connect to the entirety of an organisation’s identity infrastructure in a matter of hours, from cloud-native identity providers, explained Hed Kovetz, Silverfort’s Co-Founder and CEO.
Those providers are only aware of what happens inside their specific silo, to legacy on-prem directories such as Active Directory, which are missing basic security capabilities, Kovetz added.
“Identity has become the weakest link in enterprise security, and solving it requires a new approach – a unified, end-to-end layer of security that covers all the silos and blind spots of the identity infrastructure,” he argued.
The company plans to use the fresh capital to grow its global workforce, currently active in 15 markets around the world.
It also wants to use some funds to expand its platform with new product modules and accelerate its go-to-market strategy with an emphasis on channel partnerships.
Identity security
Kovetz said that compromised identities and credentials are the number one tactic for cyber threat actors and ransomware campaigns to not only break into organisational networks, but to spread inside networks.
“A core reason identity is the most vulnerable element in the enterprise attack surface, [it] is the market misperception that Identity and Access Management (IAM) providers—who are in charge of managing identities—are capable of securing identities,” he continued.
“In reality, they are not in a position to secure identity effectively, due to major limitations, namely the migration to hybrid and multi-cloud environments resulted in fragmented, complex enterprise environments.”
92% of companies are forced to use a combination of cloud-native and on-prem identity solutions, often from multiple vendors, he stressed.
Each of these solutions operates as a ‘silo’, with its own local security controls, without understanding the broader context of the user’s activity and without any consistent enforcement across the organization.
Moreover, many critical resources found at every company cannot be protected by IAM and identity security solutions, Kovetz noted.
“Resources such as command-line interfaces, used in most data breaches, legacy systems, service accounts, non-human identities, file shares and databases, IT/OT infrastructure, amongst others, are regularly used by attackers as the easiest way to access sensitive networks and avoid the existing security controls,” he concluded.
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