Security startup Pomerium raises $13.75M in Series A funding led by Benchmark

Pomerium, a security startup and a provider of access-first security platform, today announced it has secured $13.75 million in a Series A funding round led by Benchmark. Returning investors Bain Capital, Haystack, SNR, and Oleg Rogynskyy, founder of People.AI, also participated in this round.

With the new funding, Pomerium plans to scale its team to meet the growing demand and enhance its product offerings, expanding its reach to companies of all sizes worldwide.

As part of the funding, Benchmark general partner Eric Vishria joins Pomerium’s board. The startup also introduced its latest security platform, Pomerium Zero, which provides both on-premise and hosted solutions for securing clientless connections to web applications and services, eliminating the need for a corporate VPN.

While artificial intelligence often grabs headlines, cybersecurity remains a critical concern for organizations. In 2023, there were 2,365 cyberattacks affecting 343,338,964 individuals, with an average data breach costing $4.45 million.

After spending more than a decade in cybersecurity, CEO and founder Bobby DeSimone saw the shortcomings of traditional network-centric security approaches. Pomerium offers an application-centric solution for seamless, context-aware access, delivering faster and more secure access without a corporate VPN.

“I founded Pomerium because your security solution is only good if it’s usable – if it makes your employees’ lives harder, they’ll simply disable it or find a workaround,” says DeSimone. “Our clientless access approach means security becomes invisible to the user.”

Unlike other cybersecurity solutions currently on the market, Pomerium acts as a gateway between users and the resources they need, ensuring only authorized individuals can access protected assets. It proxies the traffic between users and resources, continuously verifying identity, access permissions, and context. This architecture enhances security and boosts productivity, benefiting developers, IT teams, and end-users alike. By handling data decryption and inspection within the company’s infrastructure, Pomerium ensures complete data privacy and reduces the risk of exposing sensitive information to third-party breaches.

Pomerium

“Pomerium, with open source at its core, is poised to create a massive shift in the way enterprises evaluate and buy cybersecurity,” said Eric Vishria, General Partner at Benchmark. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a security product speed up organizations instead of slow them down. Bobby and his team have done the impossible and created a security product that everyone in your company actually likes to use.”

Pomerium’s innovative approach is already making waves, with companies like ExtraHop relying on Pomerium to secure their deployments. Businesses report faster application deployment times after integrating Pomerium’s unified access control, highlighting Pomerium’s unique position as a workflow and productivity enabler. By balancing security with productivity, Pomerium is becoming the preferred solution in a landscape rife with data breaches and ransomware attacks.

To date, Pomerium has surpassed over 1 billion Docker pulls, with millions of requests handled daily to serve thousands of users.