Opus Reimagines Remediation in the Cloud

I’m proud to announce that Opus Security has emerged from stealth this morning with a Cloud Security Orchestration and Remediation platform that will change the way organizations manage alerts. Opus’ $10M seed round, led by YL Ventures, also included Tiger Global and an array of Angel investors from across the industry, including George Kurtz (Co-Founder, CEO and President of Crowdstrike), Udi Mokady (Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of CyberArk), Dan Plastina (Former Head of AWS Security Services), Oliver Friedrichs (Co-Founder and Former CEO of Phantom Cyber, Acquired by Splunk) and Alon Cohen (Co-Founder and Former CTO of Siemplify, Acquired by Google Cloud)

At YLV, we’re very comfortable working with founders at their earliest stages, whether that means getting our hands dirty pre-idea and/or pre-team. Operating at our stage of the ecosystem requires flexibility and patience, including the willingness to roll up our sleeves and help entrepreneurs figure out where they can make an impact within a dynamic and fast-moving industry. With Meny and Or, however, it was clear that they came to us with an already deep understanding of their problem space and associated customer pain points, having formulated a hypothesis for how to address a major gap in today’s cloud security infrastructure. The team didn’t need our assistance in determining if this was a big problem – they needed someone to help them attack the problem at high velocity.

Regardless of conviction level, we encourage founders to speak to as many potential customers as possible as they get started. While our internal research had previously illuminated a clear challenge around the volume of alerts being generated by existing posture management tools, there is nothing like live, honest, direct brainstorming sessions with potential customers to increase the precision and depth of understanding of a problem space. While we heard CISOs focusing on better cloud visibility several years ago (with many still on this journey today), we’d been hearing more recently, “now that we have all of this visibility, what do we do with it?”. This is the exact question that Meny and Or looked to solve, and we weren’t surprised when after six CISO Advisor calls over the course of ~24 hours, we had a space we were excited about and a team we knew was up for the task.

Meny and Or were intimately familiar with the value of orchestration and remediation tools from their time at SOAR pioneer, Siemplify.  In recent years, the rapid evolution of SecOps has dispersed responsibilities for response and remediation in a cloud-native world across organizations, driving activity well beyond the SOC, and “shifting left” into the risk reduction process.  Meny and Or’s experience and deep domain expertise allowed them to clearly see the need for decentralized, cloud-focused remediation based on a platform that drives collaboration and removes friction – and while I’m sure that these guys could tackle any number of challenges in the cybersecurity space, I truly believe we have the perfect Founder/Problem fit.

And so, it’s no surprise that Opus’ platform is already providing customers significant value, responding to and remediating alerts through seamless integration with tools including Orca, Wiz, Lacework, Palo Alto Prisma, and AWS/Azure security services. Opus is leveraging automation to free security teams from manual, time-consuming remediation processes that drain resources and leave organizations vulnerable. They understand how this platform makes users’ lives easier and how that value fits into the CISO’s overall risk management. Given their depth of experience, it was clear to Meny and Or that automation can’t be the only driving force behind remediation processes, and their discerning and contextual approach to automation allows for human attention to sensitive and complex tasks. This balance has been key for early customers.

I had heard some great things about Meny before meeting him, and he somehow exceeded my already high expectations. I’m not even sure Meny understood just how unique his background was for a first-time founder in his position – an Israeli product guy who had been dropped into New York City and subsequently served as a jack-of-all-trades, leading engagements with some of the biggest customers in the world and essentially embodying the essence of a founder without having been one. Beyond all of that, he was humble, caring, and someone I would be honored to support for years to come.

From my first meeting with Meny on a Wednesday to a wonderful Italian dinner in the heart of Tel Aviv that Saturday (and a handful of calls with CISOs in between!), we at YLV realized how special Opus could be. My Partner, Ofer Schreiber, and I went for a late night walk down Rothschild Boulevard that Saturday evening after dinner, discussing how this is the kind of team with which we can’t take any chances – to lose out on the opportunity to partner with such incredible people in such an exciting space was unthinkable to us – and so we put our foot on the gas. Within a week of that first meeting with Meny in our YLV office, we had a term sheet signed (narrowly beating my scheduled flight home to California!), and it’s been full speed ahead ever since.

Looking ahead, we see remediation becoming a bigger and bigger priority for security teams, as with greater visibility comes a greater responsibility to take action. We see a massive opportunity for an independent remediation platform such as Opus to serve as the catalyst for cloud alerts, not only helping security teams with their daily tasks but also tangibly mitigating a cloud organization’s overall risk in an efficient manner. While the market will inevitably shift as Opus grows, I know that this team has nailed its early use cases, and I am supremely confident that they are well positioned to take on any challenge that will be thrown their way.

We admire unique technology in exciting spaces – but more than anything, we love to work with brilliant, humble, driven entrepreneurs. My admiration for this team’s potential on paper has morphed into awe at their actual execution and relentless focus on customer needs. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be supporting Meny, Or and the entire Opus team, and I have no doubts when I say that this is one to keep an eye on!