Founded by Former Microsoft GM and Top Israeli Cyber Security Experts
Dazz, a fast-growing cloud security remediation company, announced that it has closed on a new round of funding and that it has raised a total of $60 million to date from some of the world’s most prominent venture capital firms. The company will expand its engineering team and build a go-to-market organization in the United States with offices in Palo Alto and New York.
Venture capital firms participating in the funding round include Insight Partners (Steve Ward), Greylock (Asheem Chandna and Sarah Guo), Index Ventures (Shardul Shah), and Cyberstarts (Gili Raanan).
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Dazz’s technology addresses the urgent security need created by the rapid adoption of cloud computing, which has been accelerated by the pandemic, and which McKinsey predicts will grow six times the speed of IT spending. While cloud and application security tools today alert on issues like code flaws and infrastructure misconfigurations, Dazz takes aim at the long-ignored and painful remediation process. The company’s automated solution cuts customers’ alert queues, vastly reduces the mean time to remediate issues, and eases tension between security and engineering teams.
“Our vision is to solve a critical set of problems while improving the effectiveness of collaboration between security teams and their business partners,” said founder and CEOÂ Merav Bahat. “To do that, even before writing a single line of code, our team worked closely with customers, and we continue to listen and understand their concerns and pains.”
Bahat served as the General Manager of the Cloud Security Business for Microsoft, and was also the Deputy CEO of Microsoft Israel R&D. She co-founded the company with CTO, Tomer Schwartz and VP R&D, Yuval Ofir, who are acclaimed cybersecurity leaders with decades of combined experience solving cloud and cybersecurity challenges across global enterprises.
Schwartz, co-founded IoT security leader Armis, was head of research at Adallom, and founded the Microsoft Security Response Center in Israel. Ofir, headed R&D at industrial cybersecurity leader Claroty and was a leader in the prestigious Israeli Defense Forces intelligence unit 8200.
Dazz already has 30 employees — among the top engineering talent in Israel — and plans to use the new funds to expand the team to 50. It also plans to use the funds to build a go-to-market and operations organization of similar size, including sales, marketing, customer success and operations in the United States, targeting Fortune 500 and fast growing tech companies.
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“Enterprises are accelerating their move to the cloud,” said Asheem Chandna, Partner at Greylock. “Dazz bridges the gap between developers and production, helping teams rapidly remediate and resolve cloud security issues.”
“Dazz’s vision of solving a critical set of cybersecurity problems related to the development and cloud environments and the need for continuous deployment for their business partners makes it a standout platform in the enterprise space,” said Steve Ward, Managing Director at Insight Partners, who will join the Dazz board.
Cyberstarts’s founder Gili Raanan, who was the first investor in Dazz, said that “cloud security is an amazingly complex task due to the variety of infrastructure and cybersecurity technologies involved. I’m thrilled to partner with the experienced and talented Dazz team. In a very short time, they built a one-of-a-kind solution to help Fortune 500 companies systematically improve their security posture.”
According to Gartner, “through 2025, more than 99% of cloud breaches will have a root cause of preventable misconfigurations or mistakes by end users.” Addressing that is a key part of the Dazz customer-centric approach.
One of Dazz’s customers, Mike Towers, CISO at Takeda Pharmaceuticals International, said “Dazz is able to get issues to our developers more quickly, identify misconfigurations for direct remediation, and aggregate aspects of development security that were previously fractured and inconsistent. They innovate quickly and collaborate effectively with my team.”
“We’ve hit on an amazing opportunity,” said Bahat, “But where the rubber hits the road is the team. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with such a smart, enthusiastic and ambitious group of people. They bring every bit of their passion and customer obsession into the product.”
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