John Brennan: YL Ventures leads $8M Seed Round in Eureka to Secure Data in the Cloud

John Brennan: YL Ventures leads $8M Seed Round in Eureka to Secure Data in the Cloud

Today, we at YL Ventures are thrilled to announce the launch of Eureka, a cloud data security posture management platform that will enable enterprises to reimagine the way they approach data hygiene. Co-founded by Liat Hayun and Asaf Weiss, Eureka’s $8M seed round was led by YL Ventures and included participation from a wide swath of industry experts, including: Edna Conway (VP, Security & Risk Officer, Azure Hardware Systems & Infrastructure at Microsoft), David Hannigan (Director of Product Security Assurance at Google Cloud), Andy Ellis (Former CSO at Akamai Technologies), Ryan Gurney (Former CSO at Looker), Maarten Van Horenbeeck (CISO at Zendesk), Assaf Rappaport (CEO at Wiz), and Ben Bernstein (Former CEO at Twistlock, acquired by PANW).

Test Driving a Partnership

Working closely pre-investment with the entire YLV team over the course of several months, Liat and Asaf rigorously tested multiple hypotheses in their efforts to identify an opportunity that both quenched their thirst for solving seemingly impenetrable problems and registered as a top priority for a security community inundated with buzzwords and point solutions. “Data Security” is a massive category, and identifying the right entry into such a competitive space required several cycles of feedback and analysis. Liat and Asaf methodologically led this process with impressive patience and skill, tirelessly digging their way to a core problem that appealed both to those in search of a solution today and those thinking about the long term way to approach data hygiene in the cloud. Already excited to work with the team, this “dry run” only further instilled our confidence in their maturity and leadership skills.

I’d also like to mention how humbling it was to see the broad efforts of my YLV colleagues in support of this ideation process. Our team (now 20 in size!) worked its hardest out of a genuine excitement to partner with such a uniquely qualified team. While the contributions are too numerous to list all here, I’d be remiss not to call out the research from our own Naama Ben Dov and Yonit Wiseman, as well as the extraordinary effort put forth by Michael Cortez to support Liat and Asaf in a countless number of ways; from product strategy sessions with our CISO-in-Residence, Ryan Gurney, to deep-dive backchannel sessions with our Advisors, Michael embodied YLVs commitment to value-add investing. Looking back, it’s fair to say that Liat and Asaf inspired our team in a way that brought out the very best we have to offer.

I often marvel at how lucky we are at YLV to have the privilege of supporting amazing entrepreneurs through this part of their journey. It’s something we do not take for granted.

Eureka’s Vision

Eureka’s approach is remarkable in its brilliantly simple value proposition: discover and classify sensitive data, while leveraging a unified, platform-agnostic policy engine to continuously monitor and manage risk across the entire enterprise. With cloud adoption increasing (and cloud data stores proliferating), security teams must account for the spread of sensitive information. As Liat and Asaf dove into the intricacies of this problem space, they were able to formulate an approach that secured six verbal commitments for design partnerships from top tier U.S. customers. It’s rare to see such eagerness and commitment from CISOs at the raw ideation stage, but the team’s efforts began to bear fruit before a single line of code was even written. I’ve never seen anything quite like it!

Not only does Eureka’s platform inherently reduce risk (at its core – it is a true enterprise security solution), it also streamlines the operationalization of cloud data. Eureka will enable organizations to leverage their data more freely and efficiently, while maintaining comprehensive visibility of the company’s cloud footprint for security teams. Liat and Asaf aren’t simply helping CISOs reduce the risk associated with their data – they are achieving this in a way that will drive core business value for its customers.