Cloud Security Startup Lightspin Emerges From Stealth

Lightspin, a new cloud security startup founded by former white-hat hackers, today emerged from stealth with a $4 million seed round to close cloud security gaps in business environments. 

The Tel Aviv-based company was founded earlier this year to address the problem of ensuring security in the cloud, a technology its founders say drives opportunities for growth but brings a wave of new security challenges, including configuration vulnerabilities and complexity of the shared security model.

These complexities put companies at risk of exploitation by criminals seeking to take advantage of their shortfalls. As cloud environments grow, so does the need for staff to maintain security systems. Cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools that attempt to address errors and misconfigurations may create too much noise while concealing important security incidents. 

These were all challenges Lightspin founders experienced firsthand in offensive cybersecurity.

Co-founder and CEO Vladi Sandler has more than 12 years of cybersecurity experience, during which he led the first automotive cloud security team at Cymotive and gained an understanding of what was missing in the cloud security space. Co-founder and CTO Or Azarzar was previously a cloud security architect at Cymotive and offensive Internet of Things research and development team leader for the Israeli prime minister's office.

When they were in the position of buying security tools, Sandler and Azarzar learned the pain points a new tool should address. It should provide contextual cloud security, reduce alerts and white noise, and protect cloud environments as companies adopt new technologies over time, they explain in a blog post.

They envisioned a product that would consider all CVEs, misconfigurations, policies, and permissions, and use them to create risk insights so teams could view security issues in order of priority "in the context of their own environment," the team writes. By this, they mean a team would be able to understand how events would unfold if specific assets were breached. A cloud security platform should be able to help them visualize and identify potential attack paths. 

Now, coming out of stealth, Lightspin has more than six active deployments at Fortune 500 companies and more than 20 pilots in global organizations. Its $4 million seed funding found was led by Ibex Investors LLC. 

Read Lightspin's blog post for more information.