Cyral receives investment from Silicon Valley CISO Investments to boost data cloud security
Cyral has received a strategic investment from Silicon Valley CISO Investments (SVCI), an angel syndicate of more than 50 practicing CISOs that invests in a small number of innovative cybersecurity startups each year.
Cyral is only the fifth company to receive an investment from SVCI, which was founded in late 2019, following a rigorous due diligence process that included multiple presentations to SVCI members and insight into the company’s growth plans.
In addition to capital, SVCI will provide Cyral with advisory access to dozens of the most prominent CISOs and cybersecurity experts in the country – a benefit Cyral CEO and cofounder Manav Mital sees as invaluable.
“Securing the data cloud is one of today’s most technically challenging issues, and the CISOs of SVCI understand the opportunities in our space better than anyone,” said Mital.
“The expertise and in-the-trenches experience they bring to the table will help inform our product roadmap and provide us with an unparalleled sounding board as we work to make it easier for companies to protect their data wherever it lives.”
As more and more companies – especially the Fortune 500 – embrace digital transformation by adopting cloud-native architectures and DevOps practices, security often ends up being a complex challenge, forcing them to choose between agility and increased risk.
Cyral – whose name is derived from Saral, a Hindi word for simple – makes it easy for companies to observe, control and protect their data in the cloud and the DevOps-first world.
Cyral’s Security as Code-centric approach to protecting data enables the development and security teams to seamlessly integrate security into all the steps of development, empowering engineers to focus on core features and functionality, and simplifying configuration and authorization management for security teams.
Once deployed, Cyral intercepts all activity across data repositories, applies granular access controls, and alerts and blocks any anomalous behavior – all with zero impact on performance.
“At SVCI, we invest in start-ups that solve the problems that we ourselves wish were solved,” said Al Ghous, SVCI Co-Founder and CISO for Envision Digital.
“With Cyral, we found a team that is tackling one of the most glaringly challenging issues that CISOs like ourselves are dealing with. The elegance with which Cyral solves it, and the speed at which they are moving made the choice obvious to us.”
Founded in 2018, Cyral secured a $11M Series A investment round in January of this year, led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from A.Capital Ventures, Costanoa VC, Firebolt, SV Angel and Trifecta Capital. The company has tripled its headcount in the last year.