Lucidum launches with $4M in seed funding to eliminate blind spots across cloud, security and IT operations

Lucidum launched with $4 million in seed funding from GGV Capital and Silicon Valley CISO Investments (SVCI).

Lucidum is founded by former security and technology leaders at Splunk and backed by nearly two dozen current or former security and technology leaders to solve the ubiquitous and fundamental challenge of asset discovery and visibility that’s preventing enterprises from efficiently managing, securing, and transforming technology.

“You can’t secure what you can’t see or don’t know about, never mind control costs and their impact on your business. It really is that simple and it’s a challenge I’ve seen firsthand at every organization I’ve worked at or with – it’s the reason we started Lucidum,” said Joel Fulton, CEO and co-founder of Lucidum, and former CISO of Splunk.

“Asset visibility is perhaps the most fundamental challenge today in enterprise IT because everything else depends on it. By illuminating every corner of a network – finding even the unknown unknowns – we empower organizations to improve every other aspect of their IT, cloud, and security operations.”

The Lucidum platform employs patent-pending machine learning against a massive volume of pre-existing data to triangulate and provide context about known and unknown computers, mobile devices, cloud environments, IoT devices, microservices, and other technology assets.

Without agents or scans, Lucidum identifies anything that stores, processes, or transmits data and answers important questions about where an asset is, what it is, what it’s doing, and how it’s being used.

Through a growing list of integrations with nearly 100 of the most popular tools and platforms already in use by enterprise IT organizations, and an open API, the Lucidum platform feeds IT operations, security, cloud, compliance, finance, and other core disciplines with critical information about the assets it identifies.

“In many ways, Lucidum is like Splunk for asset discovery because of how it ingests a flood of data and condenses it in a way that gives organizations the information and context they need to take action,” said Oren Yunger who leads cybersecurity investments at GGV Capital and is also a founding member of SVCI – both investors in Lucidum.

“Beyond its leadership team, one of the very compelling things about Lucidum is its laser focus. While many other companies in the space try to do everything, Lucidum is focused on doing one thing – asset discovery and visibility – extremely well. And that one thing is a critical foundation for everything else.”

As part of Lucidum’s seed funding, Yunger is joining the company’s board of directors.

Lucidum’s co-founders are Joel Fulton, former CISO at Splunk, and Charles Feng, former head of security innovations and data science at Splunk. The founding team brings exceptional experience in IT leadership and machine learning from companies including Boeing, Nordstrom, Symantec, and Google.

Lucidum was built in conjunction with senior security leaders at global organizations across industries. Its investors include CISOs and senior IT leaders at companies including Levi’s, Cerner, Cimpress, Malwarebytes, Ross Stores, Medallia, TaskUs, Signal Sciences Corp., and Rocket Software.

“Effective IT and security management fundamentally starts with understanding what assets we have and what state they’re in,” said Ralph Pyne, head of security at NextRoll, an early access customer.

“Lucidum automatically provides us with an accurate, risk-scored picture of our entire environment, including all unknown unknowns. I expect our investment in Lucidum will yield a 10x ROI resulting from greater efficiency of other tools and a more accurate representation of the problems we need to solve.”

“The idea that IT teams can lasso every single new asset brought on the corporate network is one that everyone aspires to but is almost utopian,” said Gary Miller, vice president and head of security at TaskUs, another early access customer.

“Based on their vision and track record of identifying how it can be accomplished at Splunk and other companies, this is a problem that Joel and Charles were born to solve. By providing persistent hooks into all systems of record across our ever-changing environment, Lucidum gives us an always-on, centralized asset register that brings IT utopia within reach.”

The Lucidum platform is now available to a limited number of early access customers and a community edition will be available in Q1 2021.