Spera Takes Aim at Identity Security Posture Management

Identity security startup Spera came out of stealth with $10 million in seed funding and a platform to protect enterprises from identity-driven threats.

Spera is carving out a segment of the already crowded identity and access management (IAM) space with what it calls identity security posture management — a combination of identity attack surface management, risk reduction, and identity threat prevention, detection, and response. Spera's platform creates a real-time, continuously updated risk and context-based inventory of identities and access across cloud and on-premises environments, the company said in a release announcing the company's launch. The resulting inventory is then analyzed, assessed, and normalized so that security teams can use the granular insights for remediating identity-driven attacks. This allows security professionals to identify or mitigate partially offboarded users, overprovisioned employees, unused and risky privileges, compromised credentials, and other identity risks.

According to IBM's "Cost of a Data Breach" report, identity-based attacks involving compromised credentials and phishing were the two most common and costly attack vectors of 2022. Spera has helped solve more than 75% of critical issues within the first weeks of deployment, the company said.

"As far as identity security is concerned, security teams can't see who accesses what resource, using what identity," said Richard Reinders, VP of information security at Gravity Payments, said in the announcement.

YL Ventures, which led the funding round, has been "bullish on the identity space" for some time, said John Brennan, senior partner at YL Ventures, in the announcement. "[Despite] a massive allocation of budget to IAM solutions, existing IAM tools failed to deliver on their promise," Brennan said.

Spera's founders are CEO Dor Fledel, and CTOAriel Kadyshevitch.