CloudKnox Secures $12M in Funding to Further Accelerate Customer Growth and Product Innovation

New Investment Led by Sorenson Ventures on Heels of Triple-Digit Revenue Growth; Stephen Ward, CISO at The Home Depot, Joins Company’s Board, John Donnelly Appointed VP of Sales

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CloudKnox Security, a leader in identity authorization for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, today announced that it closed $12M in a new round of funding. Led by Sorenson Ventures with participation from early investors, including ClearSky Security, Dell Technologies Capital and Foundation Capital, the round brings CloudKnox’s total funding to $22.75M. The investment will be used to further accelerate the company’s product and go-to-market plans.

CloudKnox also announced several key additions to the company’s board and executive team. Stephen Ward, CISO at The Home Depot; Ken Elefant, managing partner at Sorenson Ventures and Suresh Batchu, co-founder and CTO at MobileIron, joined the company’s Board of Directors. The company also appointed John Donnelly as vice president of sales. John has more than 30 years of experience as a sales leader, including roles as VP of sales for MobileIron, Vontu and, most recently, as a sales advisor for ClearSky Security and Wing Venture Capital.

“We’ve seen exceptional growth from customers and prospects looking to address the number one risk in their cloud infrastructure,” said Balaji Parimi, CEO and founder at CloudKnox Security. “This positioned us to pre-emptively secure another round of funding to leverage strong market adoption and accelerate our customer expansion. We’re delighted to have Sorenson Ventures join our current investors, who continue to show their commitment to our success, welcome John to our team, and Stephen and Suresh to our board.”

The new investment comes on the heels of significant triple-digit growth in 2019 fueled by rising demand from enterprise organizations looking to protect their critical cloud resources from accidental and malicious insider threats. CloudKnox continues to add to its growing client roster while demonstrating award-winning product innovation.

“CloudKnox’s vision is compelling: enable security teams to proactively measure and mitigate the greatest risk from operating in the cloud,” said Stephen Ward. “It does so by delivering continuous detection and remediation of over-privileged identities while helping to understand and report on their cloud risk posture. I welcome the opportunity to join the board at a time of significant growth.”

CloudKnox increased the pace of product innovation with new privilege-on-demand, auto remediation and anomaly detection capabilities, integration with AWS IAM Access Analyzer and support for VMware Cloud on AWS. The company was also recently awarded two patents: the first for activity-based access control in heterogeneous environments; and the second for a method and system to detect discrepancy in infrastructure security configurations.

“CloudKnox’s exceptional growth demonstrates its value in delivering activity-based control through easily consumable data that makes it simple to take immediate action within the platform and significantly reduce insider risk,” said Ken Elefant, managing partner at Sorenson Ventures. “Based on our discussions with security leaders in Global 10,000 companies, there is a huge unmet need in the market for the CloudKnox solution.”

CloudKnox’s success and innovation over the past year also was recognized through a number of industry awards including:

• RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox – The company was named a finalist in the prestigious Innovation Sandbox competition, the launching pad for entrepreneurial cybersecurity companies to showcase their ground-breaking research and innovation
• Best of VMworld – CloudKnox was named a Best of VMworld 2019 Awards winner in the “Judge’s Choice: Startup Spotlight” category
• SC Magazine Awards 2020 – CloudKnox was named a finalist in the “Rookie Security Company of the Year” category
• Info Security Products Guide 2019 – CloudKnox was recognized as the Gold winner in the “New Product or Service of the Year” category
• Cyber Security Excellence Awards 2019 – The CloudKnox Cloud Security Platform was named a winner in the “Hybrid Cloud Security” category
• National Cyber Security Centre – CloudKnox was selected to join the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)’s fourth Cyber Accelerator cohort

For more information or to learn more about CloudKnox, please visit: https://cloudknox.io/

About CloudKnox Security
CloudKnox Security is the only cloud security platform built from the ground-up to support the monitoring and management of identities, actions and resources across hybrid and multi-cloud environments using an Activity-based Authorization model. Through an extensible single platform, CloudKnox transforms how organizations implement the principle of least privilege and empowers security teams to proactively address accidental and malicious credential misuse by continuously detecting and mitigating identity risks. CloudKnox is based in Sunnyvale, CA.