Push Security raises $4 million to introduce user-centric approach to securing SaaS
Push Security announced it completed a $4 million seed round led by Decibel and backed by prominent industry leaders, including Jon Oberheide, co-founder of Duo Security, and Haroon Meer, CEO and founder of Thinkst.
With this funding, Push will continue to develop technology that guides employees to make smart decisions while they are using company SaaS platforms, enlisting their help to improve security.
In a cloud-first world, employees are moving fast and adopting SaaS platforms to get things done. Most organizations have hundreds of SaaS apps in use in their environment and the majority of those apps are owned by employees rather than IT or security. SaaS makes productivity gains and technical innovation accessible for companies of all sizes, but it also introduces risk to the business unless it’s properly managed. Without a way to ensure employees are using SaaS securely, many organizations resort to try to control SaaS with highly restrictive policies, which is frustrating for both employees and security teams.
Push believes that the best way to support this move toward productivity and flexibility is to adopt a user-centric approach — to equip employees to improve their own security while using SaaS.
“The world of work is shifting in a big way,” said Adam Bateman, Push co-founder and CEO. “Employees want flexibility and they need the right tools to be productive, but those tools aren’t always company-approved. So, they’re signing up for those tools on their own. Security teams want to assert some control over this because SaaS apps introduce risk to their company, so they often try to simply lock down SaaS.
“However, in the long run this just encourages employees to work around the security team. You can’t secure SaaS that’s owned by employees without working with employees. We’ve built a lightweight, scalable way to let employees use SaaS responsibly, guiding them to actually fix security issues, while offloading work from security teams. We’ll prove along the way that employees don’t need to just be seen as part of the problem, but can actually become part of the solution.”
“The future of cyber resilience in a SaaS-first world needs cloud-scale solutions designed for the user,” added Ollie Whitehouse, angel investor and CTO at NCC Group. “Push has delivered a solution that has unlimited potential to provide value to all organizations in such a world.”
Jon Sakoda, Push investor and founder of Decibel, invested in Push’s vision for the future and scalable approach to a really difficult problem. “The Push team has set out to help organizations of every size safely adopt SaaS,” said Jon. “The co-founders have deep security experience as researchers and red teamers, and they’re applying that knowledge to an exponentially growing problem that no one else has been able to solve. I can’t wait to see what the Push team will do to apply user-centric security to finally help organizations progress beyond traditional security solutions that have not been able to keep up with the pace of modern IT.”
“Push is connecting the dots between users and their SaaS applications, allowing them to use the apps they love while keeping their organization secure,” added Jon Oberheide, angel investor, co-founder and former CTO of Duo Security (acquired by Cisco).