Cloud detection and response startup Gem Security Ltd. said today it has closed on a $23 million early-stage round of funding.

The oversubscribed Series A round was led by GGV Capital and IBM Ventures, and saw the participation of existing backer Team8 and a host of angel investors. Gem Security, which only launched in February when it announced an $11 million seed funding round, says its total amount raised now stands at $34 million.

The company has created a purpose-built cloud detection and response, or CDR platform that helps companies to reduce the time it takes to detect, investigate and contain cloud-native threats to their multicloud information technology environments. One of the things it does is centralized visibility into the complex IT infrastructure operated by most companies, while offering forensic tools and automated incident timelining that helps customers understand the underlying root cause of each breach it detects.

Gem Security says its cloud-native forensic security platform is becoming all the more relevant at a time when cloud infrastructure adoption is rising rapidly. It cites data from Google LLC that shows that 72% of organizations today leverage multicloud infrastructure to host their applications and services. These environments can be extremely complex to understand and pose unprecedented security challenges, the startup claims. For instance, it claims that most modern malware these days is fileless and operates in-memory, without leaving any traces of itself on disk, making it difficult to find using traditional cybersecurity methods.

Gem Security co-founder and Chief Executive Arie Zilberstei, formerly a member of the Israeli Intelligence Corps Unit 8200, said the growing adoption of cloud changes everything for security operations and response teams. “Traditional detection and response approaches weren’t designed to address the dynamic and complex nature of multicloud environments, and cloud expertise is in short supply,” he insisted.

To overcome these challenges and cater to multicloud customers, Gem Security has made sure that its cloud-native CDR platform supports all three major clouds – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure – as well as Kubernetes, the container orchestration software that’s used to manage modern applications. Gem says its platform also integrates with existing security tools, such as security information and event management and security orchestration, automation, and response tools, as well as leading identity platforms and source code repositories. Through these integrations, it can leverage additional data to aid in its forensic investigations.

With Gem Security, customers get access to a continually updated Cloud Incident Readiness dashboards from which they can track attacks as they take place in real time. It provides behavioral analytics and enriched context across user’s entire cloud infrastructure environment, allowing them to instantly respond and isolate risks that emerge through its cloud-native quarantine tools.

Security is a big deal and those novel capabilities have helped Gem Security achieve a number of milestones this year. It notes that it has twice been recognized in research by the analyst firm Gartner Inc. this year, in its Cool Vendors for the Modern Security Operations Center report and also as a Sample Vendor for Cloud Investigation and Response Automation in Gartner’s 2023 Hype Cycle for Workload and Network Security report.

At the same time, it claims to have significantly grown its customer base, adding large enterprises such as Repsol SA and Allan Gray Proprietary Ltd. It has also announced key partnerships with AWS, IBM Corp. and Snowflake Inc. this year.

GGV Capital Partner Oren Yunger said it’s clear that the security operations model needs to evolve to cater to the cloud-native environments of today. “Security teams don’t reliably know when they are being attacked, let alone why or how those attacks are occurring,” he said. “Gem has built a unique platform that allows CISOs and their teams to prepare, detect, respond and remediate cloud security attacks – with context and fast.”

Photo: Gem Security