Confluera snags $9M Series A to help stop cyber attacks in real time

Just yesterday, we experienced yet another major breach when Capital One announced it had been hacked and years of credit card  application information had been stolen. Another day, another hack, but the question is how can companies protect themselves in the face of an onslaught of attacks. Confluera, a Palo Alto startup wants to help with a new tool that purports to stop these kinds of attacks in real time.

Today the company, which launched last year, announced a $9 million Series A investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. It also has the backing of several influential technology execs including John W. Thompson, who is chairman of Microsoft and former CEO at Symantec, Frank Slootman, CEO at Snowflake and formerly CEO at ServiceNow and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks.

What has attracted this interest is the company’s approach to cyber security. “Confluera is a real-time cyber security company. We are delivering the industry’s first platform to deterministically stop cyber attacks in real time,” company co-founder and CEO Abhijit Ghosh told TechCrunch.

To do that Ghosh says, his company’s solution watches across the customer’s infrastructure, finds issues and recommends ways to mitigate the attack. “We see the problem that there are too many solutions which have been used. What is required is a platform that has visibility across the infrastructure, and uses security information from multiple sources to make that determination of where the attacker currently is and how to mitigate that,” he explained.

Microsoft chairman John Thompson, who is also an investor, says this is more than just real-time detection or real-time remediation. “It’s not just the audit trail and telling them what to do. It’s more importantly blocking the attack in real time. And that’s the unique nature of this platform, that you’re able to use the insight that comes from the science of the data to really block the attacks in real time,” Thompson said.

It’s early days for Confluera as it has 19 employees and 3 customers using the platform so far. For starters, it will be officially launching next week at Black Hat. After that, it has to continue building out the product and prove that it can work as described to stop the types of attacks we see on a regular basis from happening.

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