Axonius announces $4M seed round to secure the explosion of connected devices

Israeli startup Axonius today announced $4 million in seed funding for its mission to secure and manage the growing billions of connected devices in use by businesses. Backing for the technology platform comes from YL Ventures, with participation from Vertex Ventures and Emerge Capital.

Axonius founders, left to right: CTO Avidor Bartov, CEO Dean Sysman and CPO Ofri Shur.

This proliferation of device types and numbers introduces significant risk into corporate environments, as organizations have thousands or more of unmanaged, uncontrolled devices on their networks, all of which can be exploited to breach networks, disrupt business and steal information. Axonius was founded to solve this problem.

“We expect more than 10 billion devices will be in use by 2020 and organizations cannot afford to be blind to them,” according to Eric Ogren, senior analyst with 451 Research.

The Axonius platform

The Axonius platform eliminates blind spots on the network and provides a single place to understand, manage and control the security of end user, compute and IoT devices. By doing so, organizations using Axonius can take advantage of the capabilities of new and existing networked devices in order to gain competitive advantage in their businesses.

“We are experiencing a Cambrian-like explosion on our networks,” said Yoav Leitersdorf, managing partner at YL Ventures, who led the Axonius funding round. “Mobility, cloud and IoT are creating a near exponential increase in the types and numbers of user, compute and new devices connecting to enterprise networks. With this explosion comes the inherent cyber risk associated with the lack of visibility, security and control.”

Controlling all devices and device types

Today, IT security and operations teams rely on device-specific, standalone tools using manual processes and custom scripting to tie them together. This leaves these already stretched teams with too much repetitive and error-prone work, poor visibility and capability gaps. It is hard, if not impossible, for them to enable and accelerate the safe adoption and use of all of the current and future devices on their networks.

By standardizing the interface for devices and leveraging existing standalone tools and controls, Axonius delivers a unified, comprehensive view and a simple, centralized way of controlling all devices and device types.

Axonius provides open APIs and simple graphical operational interfaces to connect new device types and tools to the platform via adaptors, and new controls via plug-ins. In addition, Axonius provides a modern and secure exchange and sharing infrastructure for these adaptors and plug-ins.

Dean Sysman, Axonius CEO and co-founder, explains that today’s IT environments have transitioned over the last decade from controlled, centralized architectures, to become decentralized and fragmented. “It has become an almost impossible task for CIOs and CISOs to answer the simplest questions, such as, ‘How many devices are currently on your network?’ or ‘How many devices on your network shouldn’t be there?’ or ‘Are these devices secure?’” said Sysman. “This lack of visibility and control creates an unwanted speed limit on innovation. With the Axonius Platform, IT and security operations teams gain unprecedented visibility and control of the devices on their networks, allowing them to be innovation partners and enablers for the business.”

The Axonius Platform is currently in limited availability to qualified customers. General availability will be in early 2018. For more information, visit Axonius.com.