CloudKnox scores $12M funding to help enterprises protect their critical cloud infrastructure from accidents and malicious insiders

CloudKnox Security, a tech startup and a provider of identity authorization for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, today announced that it closed $12 million in a new round of funding to further accelerate the company’s product and go-to-market plans. The round, which was led bySorenson Ventures with participation from early investors, including ClearSky Security, Dell Technologies Capital and Foundation Capital, brings the company’s total funding to $22.75 million. In conjunction with the funding, CloudKnox also announced several key additions to the company’s board and executive team

Founded in 2015 by Balaji Parimi and Rao Cherukuri, the Sunnyvale, California-based CloudKnox provides a single platform that manages the entire identity privilege lifecycle across any private and public cloud infrastructure. Through an extensible single platform, CloudKnox transforms how organizations implement the principle of least privilege and empowers security teams to proactively address accidental and malicious credential misuse by continuously detecting and mitigating identity risks

“We’ve seen exceptional growth from customers and prospects looking to address the number one risk in their cloud infrastructure,” said Balaji Parimi, CEO and founder at CloudKnox Security. “This positioned us to pre-emptively secure another round of funding to leverage strong market adoption and accelerate our customer expansion. We’re delighted to have Sorenson Ventures join our current investors, who continue to show their commitment to our success, welcome John to our team, and Stephen and Suresh to our board.”

The new investment comes on the heels of significant triple-digit growth in 2019 fueled by rising demand from enterprise organizations looking to protect their critical cloud resources from accidental and malicious insider threats. CloudKnox continues to add to its growing client roster while demonstrating award-winning product innovation.

“CloudKnox’s vision is compelling: enable security teams to proactively measure and mitigate the greatest risk from operating in the cloud,” said Stephen Ward. “It does so by delivering continuous detection and remediation of over-privileged identities while helping to understand and report on their cloud risk posture. I welcome the opportunity to join the board at a time of significant growth.”

CloudKnox increased the pace of product innovation with new privilege-on-demand, auto remediation and anomaly detection capabilities, integration with AWS IAM Access Analyzer and support for VMware Cloud on AWS. The company was also recently awarded two patents: the first for activity-based access control in heterogeneous environments; and the second for a method and system to detect discrepancy in infrastructure security configurations.

“CloudKnox’s exceptional growth demonstrates its value in delivering activity-based control through easily consumable data that makes it simple to take immediate action within the platform and significantly reduce insider risk,” said Ken Elefant, managing partner at Sorenson Ventures. “Based on our discussions with security leaders in Global 10,000 companies, there is a huge unmet need in the market for the CloudKnox solution.”