Congratulations Ermetic and Tenable!

When we first met Shai, Michael, Sivan and Arick in Tel Aviv during early 2020 (and the start of Covid-19), cloud adoption in the enterprise was well underway, remote working was becoming increasingly popular and IoT devices were proliferating everywhere. While these advances offered enterprises the advantages of increased speed, efficiency, and flexibility, they also presented companies with new security challenges. 

The corporate network perimeter’s relevance was fading and existing tools and processes no longer met the security demands of the complex cloud world, with hundreds of identities, roles and access policies. Identity had now become the most critical attack surface in cloud native applications and needed to be urgently addressed - something repeat entrepreneurs Shai, Michael, Sivan and Arick recognized early on. And so Ermetic stepped into the spotlight.

As the top VC investor in cybersecurity globally (according to Pitchbook data) with the broadest security portfolio, the Accel team deeply understands the security landscape. Over the years, we’ve partnered with category-defining security companies, including IPO, Netskope, and Sysdig, and leaders in the identity security space, such as 1Password, BetterCloud, Callsign, Centrify, Socure and ForgeRock. Ermetic’s talented team of co-founders blew us away with their thoughtful approach, technical expertise and commercial know-how

On the technical side, the company was an early mover in cloud infrastructure security, building a phenomenal platform that surfaced and visualized risks, such as rich permission graphs that mapped individual identities to specific resources. By revealing and prioritizing security gaps in AWS, Azure and GCP, the platform enabled security and engineering leaders to quickly remediate any issues. Beyond this, Ermetic’s team also set out to shape a new category labeled CIEM (Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management) by Gartner. After test-driving the product, our team was impressed with Ermetic’s technical approach as well as the co-founders’ longer term vision. 

Fast forward to today and the company is not only a pioneer, but a market leader in Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement  Management. Ermetic’s initial CIEM platform was followed by its comprehensive Cloud Native Application Protection (CNAPP) platform, providing customers with contextual, prioritized risk analysis and rapid remediation across the cloud stack. The company is now partnering with and protecting organizations - including many of the Fortune 50 - across the globe and Shai, Michael, Sivan and Arick have succeeded in attracting talent from some of the most recognisable names in technology.

The reasons that impressed and convinced our team to lead Ermetic’s Series A back in July 2020, along with the surge of cloud migration during covid and rise of two new cloud security categories, make the company the ideal solution to join forces with Tenable. Coincidentally, Accel also led Tenable's Series A in 2012 and we were fortunate enough to work with the team for the six years of their journey before their IPO. Amit and the Tenable team share Ermetic’s conviction that cloud identities and entitlements are the most important and complex areas of security to  address now. With the majority of organizations now hybrid on-premise/cloud and the threat landscape continually shifting, we can’t think of two better teams to tackle the continually evolving security challenges together. Congratulations to the Ermetic team and thank you for letting us be a part of your journey!