The cloud identity security platform proves that there is still a lot of venture capital in cybersecurity British announced today that it has raised $20.5 million in a Series B funding round. Led by Pelion Venture Partners with participation from Liberty Global Ventures, Crosslink Capital and One Way Ventures, the new brings Britive’s total proceeds to $36 million.

CEO Art Poghosyan says it will be spent expanding the company’s investments in customer success, marketing and sales, as well as product development.

“Ironically, the pandemic has impacted Britive’s business more positively than not,” Poghosyan told australiabusinessblog.com in an email interview. “It accelerated the transition to virtualizing work environments and the transition from data center to cloud.”

There’s truth to that. According to a 2022 questionnaire of Equinix, 71% of IT decision makers plan to move more functions to the cloud in the next 12 months. The cloud has many advantages, including scalability and accessibility. But there are also drawbacks – one of them is (possibly) security. a poll of the Cloud Security Alliance reveals that nearly a third of companies using a public cloud provider have experienced security vulnerabilities in the past two years, including unauthorized apps and poorly configured APIs.

Poghosyan says Britive is built to address those cloud security concerns, particularly on the identity and access management (IAM) side. Founded in 2018, the startup platform generates access rights — including tokens and keys — on demand for people and software accessing cloud services and apps.

“Our technology automatically expires and removes privileges when not in use to ensure that the cloud keys and tokens are not exposed to attacks 24 hours a day,” said Poghosyan. “Britive’s offerings allow development teams to continue building at cloud speed, while security teams retain full visibility and control over cloud identities and privileges.

However, Britive is far from the only player in the huge and growing IAM market. There are well-capitalized companies like Saviynt, whose platform enables companies to secure apps, data, and infrastructure on a single platform. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo paid billions to acquire identity access management startups SailPoint, Ping Identity and ForgeRock. On the less grandiose end of the spectrum, there are companies like ConductorOne, which aims to bring automation to identity and access management.

Poghosyan claims Britive’s anomaly-spotting AI sets it apart from the others out there. Using AI, Britive analyzes cloud user activity logs in near real-time and tries to identify patterns of behavior that may be dangerous or illicit. The platform then alerts the relevant security teams, giving them the ability to quickly terminate potentially problematic sessions.

australiabusinessblog.com cannot comment on Britive’s efficacy. But the company’s growth suggests something is up. Poghosyan says annual recurring revenue runs in the “millions” of dollars and grows 3x a year, and that Britive now has “dozens” of customers, including several Fortune 500 brands.

“Our platform manages thousands of active privileged identities every day that interact with critical business applications and infrastructure hosted on major cloud platforms,” added Poghosyan. “Even in a broader climate of economic slowdown, large enterprises continue to invest in future-proofing their cloud infrastructure and security solutions, of which Britive is an essential part.”

Britive, which currently has about 55 employees, expects to add 10 to 20 staff by the end of the year, Poghosyan said.