Luminate Security, provider of the first universal platform for secure access to corporate applications in hybrid clouds, today emerged from stealth and announced a total of  $14M in combined round A and seed funding. Luminate is backed by U.S. Venture Partners and Aleph Venture Capital along with the ScaleUp program of Microsoft for startups. Joining Luminate's board of directors are USVP's Jacques Benkoski and Aleph's Aaron Rosenson. 

Luminate was founded in January 2017 and has spent the last 14 months developing and deploying its software with production-grade paying enterprise customers, including international financial, technology, and consumer services enterprises.

With the rise of the cloud and complex hybrid environments, traditional network perimeter security techniques, such as VPNs, DMZs and network firewall solutions become obsolete. CISOs, CIOs and CTOs are under pressure to facilitate quick and dynamic adoption of new business applications to support their organization's business needs without compromising on security.

Traditional security approaches rely on multiple layers of network security solutions, such as VPNs and firewalls. Managing and updating all these solutions used to be a resource-heavy endeavor. With the adoption of hybrid cloud datacenters, it has become impossible to effectively secure corporate resources in this manner.

"Luminate's solution takes the BeyondCorp philosophy as a starting point and transforms security in corporate IT networks. Luminate provides a unified security stack on all environments that allows only point-to-point, ad-hoc user access to specific corporate resources, wherever they are hosted. At no point in time is the corporate network exposed," said Luminate CEO, Ofer Smadari. "Our platform deploys in less than five minutes and, once in place, provides full visibility and complete governance of users' actions when accessing corporate resources."

Unlike traditional security solutions, Luminate enables IT operations to move at the speed of digital business requirements, integrating seamlessly with their existing IT tools. Employees can safely access any corporate resources from any device while IT and security teams gain a comprehensive security governance framework, effectively eliminating risks of attacks on their resources.

Luminate's approach is based on Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP). Gartner recently noted  Software-Defined Perimeter as one of the top technologies for information security in 2017. According to Gartner, "by 2021, 60% of enterprises will phase out network VPNs for digital business communications in favor of software-defined perimeters, up from less than 1% in 2016."

CTO Gay Naor of NEX Group (formerly ICAP), one of the world's largest financial technology companies, that manages $1.5 trillion transactions a day on its platform, said: "Our employees and contractors from around the world use on-premises and cloud-based corporate applications. It is critical that we balance granting access to these apps while maintaining tight security standards. Luminate's BeyondCorp-as-as-service platform provides us with a practical access solution to all our applications while minimizing our risk exposure. Deploying Luminate's solution saved us at least 18 months and hundreds of man hours."

"Luminate's unique approach operates on the application level. It is agentless and, therefore, can be adopted quickly by large populations of corporate role-players, without forcing a disruptive change in the organization's existing architecture, user permissions and applications," said Smadari.

Luminate seamlessly integrates with all cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service and on-premises data center technologies. The user experiences the freedom to access any application, wherever it is hosted, from whatever device or location worldwide, through a consistent, cloud-native user experience.

Luminate founders are cyber security veterans Ofer Smadari, Leonid Belkind, and Eldad Livni. As part of elite Israeli military technological units and playing senior roles in some of Israel's most innovative security and infrastructure companies including Check Point Software Technologies and Adallom (acquired by Microsoft), the co-founders have an extensive background in information security and vast experience in delivering scalable and reliable security solutions to Fortune 100 companies.

Luminate, which is headquartered in Israel and Silicon Valley, plans to use the funding for expanding its operations in the United States and developing its channels and customer base.