• Stack Identity’s patent-pending algorithm detects and eliminates unauthorized, invisible shadow access to prevent cloud data breaches

• WestWave Capital and Benhamou Global Ventures co-led the seed funding round

• Silicon Valley startup was founded by cybersecurity industry veterans with decades of industry experience across Symantec, McAfee, IBM, Netskope and BlueCoat

Stack Identity, a Silicon Valley startup automating identity and access management (IAM) governance to identify and eliminate cloud data threat vectors, announced its emergence from stealth mode. The company also announced the closing of a $4 million seed funding round co-led by WestWave Capital and Benhamou Global Ventures.

In the rapidly evolving realm of cloud-based identity and access management (IAM), businesses are unable to protect sensitive data if they don’t know who has access, why, and for how long. Stack Identity was created to solve this problem, making it easier for customers to protect critical and sensitive data stored in the cloud by eliminating applications and services from rogue access, and preventing unauthorized data sharing and data exfiltration.

Protecting sensitive data in a complex data sharing environment is only possible by addressing the access layer and specifically what Stack Identity defines as ‘shadow access’.

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“It’s our vision and conviction that the future of cloud security must be identity-first, access-centric and with a deep context of data, applications and software. The support of our investors brings this vision to reality.”

Additional investors in the round include Plug and Play and notable cybersecurity investors. The investment capital will enable Stack Identity to further invest in solving the challenge of automating cloud security as enterprises accelerate the development of data-centric and AI powered applications. Stack Identity will use the funds to scale product development, strengthen go-to-market strategies and expand customer reach, including SMBs, mid-market and enterprises.

“The security landscape has profoundly changed—and the market demand for identity and access management to evolve was an inspiration for creating something unique and different from status quo IAM solutions,” said Venkat Raghavan, CEO and founder of Stack Identity. “It’s our vision and conviction that the future of cloud security must be identity-first, access-centric and with a deep context of data, applications and software. The support of our investors brings this vision to reality.”

Stack Identity was created to address the problem of shadow access—unauthorized, unmonitored, and invisible cloud data access patterns created by the myriad of human and machine cloud identities accessing the cloud. Businesses of all sizes can now benefit from Stack Identity’s automated breach detection leveraging advanced heuristics that continuously detects and removes bad actors from cloud environments.

Eliminating Shadow Access as DevOps and SecOps Battle for Cloud Access Control

Security concerns have become more significant as more companies move operations and data into the cloud. Cloud data is continuously exposed via thousands of automated, distributed access controls and entitlements, both human and API-based. One of the greatest challenges for organizations is ensuring that authorized identities have access to sensitive data while, at the same time, detecting and eliminating threats from unidentified users.

Without visibility, risky behavior cannot be effectively identified, prioritized and remediated. Despite security measures put in place by security teams, lack of visibility causes blindspots and shadow access for attackers to wreak havoc on organizations.

Through its patent-pending Breach Prediction Index (BPI) algorithm, Stack Identity reduces the risk of cloud vulnerabilities and improves IAM audits, compliance and governance. The BPI enables Stack Identity customers to prioritize both risk and impact. Using its BPI, Stack Identity customers are empowered to detect the 2% of toxic combinations that impact 90% of data assets.

Investor & Customer Thoughts on Stack Identity Seed Funding Round

“We are very proud to co-lead the investment in Stack Identity,” said Gaurav Manglik, General Partner at Westwave Capital. “Venkat and the team are tackling an untenable security problem created by the proliferation of thousands of automated and human identities in the cloud, with an identity-first data security approach. We believe in the team’s expertise in security, and Stack Identity’s deep technology to differentiate in a crowded IAM market.”

“Stack Identity represents the winning formula we look for in our deal evaluation frameworks, namely, the combination of technology and team,” said Yashwanth Hemaraj, Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures. “As we accelerate into an Enterprise 4.0 world, Stack Identity is primed to emerge as a future market leader in the IAM space as enterprises accelerate digital transformation initiatives and the sanctity and security of data continue to increase in importance and value.”

“Our AWS cloud ecosystem is a mix of automated DevOps and manually managed infrastructure,” said Steve De Jong, distinguished engineer at Vercara. “Stack Identity gives continuous visibility into our data exposure risks with the ability to automate least privileged enforcement for both our security and engineering operations teams.”

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