April 19, 2023
Data Fabric Specialist Avalor Raises $30M to Stop the Security Data Deluge
(via Midjourney)
A new data fabric player is on the scene, this time for security. Avalor has emerged from stealth via a $25 million Series A round for a total of $30 million raised.
Avalor’s Data Fabric for Security application uses automated services and APIs to integrate disparate data sources, including those from legacy systems, data lakes, data warehouses, SQL databases, applications, or any other source of data, the company asserts.
Company co-founders Raanan Raz, CEO, and Kfir Tishbi, CTO, previously founded Datorama, a cloud data platform for marketing that was acquired by Salesforce in 2018: “Our experience building and growing Datorama, which enables data integration and insights across a complex, data-rich marketing stack, made us realize that the ‘data deluge’ problem isn’t unique to the marketing function,” the co-founders wrote in a blog post.
Raz and Tishbi say they heard about a growing problem from security professionals: too many disparate data streams with not enough bandwidth or expertise to integrate them all or effectively manage their security. The team was inspired to use a data fabric architecture to solve this data problem for security teams and create an open, scalable foundation for multiple use cases.
“Building a data-first solution on top of a data fabric means that you first aggregate, de-duplicate and normalize the data without focusing on a specific use case. Once the data is organized and prioritized, teams can make sense of it and take action,” they wrote.
Avalor co-founders, CTO Kfir Tishbi (left) and CEO Raanan Raz (right). (Source: Avalor)
Data fabric is taking off, and in Gartner’s view, “data fabric architecture is key to modernizing data management and integration,” because it can pinpoint important relationships between data points from continuously connected data from multiple sources. Forrester says the newer data fabrics, or data fabric 2.0, are now addressing security and regulatory compliance needs, and that tightening regulations around data storage and processing is driving these capabilities.
Raz and Tishbi tout their application’s abilities to automatically aggregate, normalize, and de-duplicate risk data from discovery to remediation, providing “a single source of truth for assets, controls, identities, vulnerabilities, security bugs, and other related data points.” The co-founders share that they envision the future of their data fabric as a platform to enable others to power their own applications.
Avalor will use the investment funding to expand its operations in the U.S. and Israel, according to a release, and the company is hiring for roles in R&D, product and solution, sales, marketing, and customer success.
Today’s $25 million Series A investment was led by TCV, with participation from Salesforce Ventures. The funding adds to a $5 million Seed round led by Cyberstarts in 2022 with participation from Jibe Ventures. Morgan Gerlak, Partner at TCV will join Avalor’s board of directors.
“Security teams don’t struggle to generate data; they struggle to organize data so that it’s both actionable and useful,” said Gerlak in a release. “Avalor addresses this pervasive data problem and helps security teams make faster, more accurate decisions. Importantly, we believe the company’s data fabric can power several applications over time, starting with vulnerability management.”
Avalor’s board of directors includes Doug Merritt, former CEO of Splunk, and Emily Heath, general partner at Cyberstarts and former CISO of DocuSign and United Airlines.
“Cybersecurity is a data problem,” said Merritt. “Challenges with the cyber landscape continue to swell as vendors appropriately generate compelling new technology that is coupled with last generation solutions. The cyber thread across this enormous number of specialty tools is data. But, gathering, synthesizing, and pulling accurate and effective insight out of this high volume of convoluted and complex data has remained elusive, until Avalor. Avalor has taken a unique and highly effective approach to solve this problem for both security and the business.”
“There is so much data available now in the world of security that it’s difficult for security to connect the dots and create a single source of truth that is both trusted and usable by our business partners,” said Health. “As a CISO, I was so tired of not having a solution for this problem. Avalor has a tried and true leadership team who’ve built and operated massive data platforms inside a business with large enterprise customers.”
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