Israeli-US cybersecurity tech startup Semperis raises over $200M in funding led by private equity firm KKR

Even as more signs of a slowdown in funding tech startups, that didn’t stop investors from pouring billions of dollars into promising startups. Some of the areas benefiting from large rounds of funding are cybersecurity and healthcare. One of these startups is Semperis, an Israeli-US cybersecurity startup that protects enterprises’ remote working environments from cyberattacks.

Today, Semperis announced it has raised over $200 million in a funding round led by private equity firm KKR & Co Inc, with participation from existing investors including Insight Partners, and new investors Ten Eleven Ventures. KKR’s investment comes through its Next Generation Technology Growth Fund II, which raised $2.2 billion from investors in January 2020.

The latest funding comes just two years after raising $40 million in May 2020 at about a $142 million valuation, according to private market data provider PitchBook.

Semperis will use the funding proceeds to grow its research-and-development team across the United States, Canada, and Israel, and continue to grow its customer base in Europe and Asia. It also said it plans to expand beyond identity protection into protecting a customer’s entire cloud data.

Founded in 2013 by CEO Mickey Bresman, Guy Teverovsky, and Matan Liberman, the Hoboken, New Jersey-based Semperis is a provider of identity-driven cyber resilience and threat mitigation platforms and solutions for cross-cloud and hybrid environments, with a focus on Microsoft’s Active Directory – a directory service widely used by Fortune 500 companies across industries.

“From day one, Semperis has been on a mission to be a force for good,” said Semperis CEO Mickey Bresman, who co-founded Semperis along with Guy Teverovsky and Matan Liberman. “With Semperis’ multi-layered identity protection, organizations can fend off cyber attacks without being forced to choose between two bad options: paying the criminals or getting shut down. With the combined experience that KKR, Ten Eleven Ventures, Insight Partners, and other esteemed investors in this round bring scaling high-growth cybersecurity companies, we have an elite group of strategic partners in our corner to help advance our mission.”

Bresman added: “We are focusing on identity-driven cyber resilience and threat mitigation because in this new reality where companies are working remotely and accessing applications and assets in the cloud, putting everything behind a firewall no longer offers the same degree of protection.”

It’s estimated that Active Directory is exploited in 90% of cyberattacks. Semperis’ patented technology for Microsoft Active Directory protects over 40 million identities from cyberattacks, data breaches, and operational errors.

In 2020, the company reported $11.6 million in revenue. Semperis also told news outlet Reuters that its revenue has more than doubled year-over-year.