Bridgecrew, a company that makes it simple for organizations to automatically deploy cloud security engineering, today emerged from stealth mode by launching its Codified Cloud Security platform and announcing new funding. Its new, $14 million Series A round was led by global investment firm Battery Ventures with participation from NFX, who led Bridgecrew's $4 million seed round. Series A investors also include Sorensen Ventures, DNX Ventures, Tectonic Ventures, and Homeward Ventures.

In addition, a number of strategic investors and cloud-security luminaries joined the Series A round. They include Lookout Founder Kevin Mahaffey; Spotify's head of security, David Hannigan; Marqeta CISO David Tsao; Netflix's head of cloud security, Srinath Kuruvadi; and AWS Security senior manager Ely Kahn.

The new funds will be used to aggressively scale Bridgecrew's novel solution, which enables DevSecOps engineers to quickly and seamlessly secure cloud infrastructure and conduct remediation delivered as code. This comes only one year after the company was founded by cybersecurity experts Idan Tendler, Barak Schoster Goihman, and Guy Eisenkot.

Platform Automatically Identifies and Remediates Cloud Security Issues

Traditional cloud security tools merely detect gaps in infrastructure security, pushing open issues and violations to DevOps and engineering teams to resolve. This requirement of manual remediation means issues take days or weeks to resolve, leaving a company's infrastructure vulnerable. It's also become the main deterrent for companies implementing cloud security and migrating to the cloud.

Bridgecrew's developer-first solution allows DevOps and engineering teams to save critical time and money as they address these ongoing security tasks with just the click of a button. The automated technology is also well-suited for the age of COVID-19 and today's volatile market environment in which many organizations are trying to automate security and DevOps processes to cut costs and become significantly more efficient.

"Most security breaches happen because of a slight mistake somewhere over the course of an extremely complex process," said Bridgecrew CEO and Co-Founder Tendler, who previously co-founded Fortscale, a cybersecurity company acquired by RSA Security in 2018. "Infrastructure security responsibility is naturally shifting left in organizations to software engineers, yet they lack the automation tools to remediate issues and quickly fix them. Bridgecrew is a developer-first company which automates security-engineering work without inflating the engineering backlog. Using rapid remediation, we not only save time and reduce workload from engineers, but we also help them to do their jobs better and ramp up organizational migration to the cloud."

Announcing Free Community Offering

Since its initial seed investment, Bridgecrew has assembled a team of world-class security and DevOps engineers to build the next-generation security platform. It developed its game-changing platform just last year and already is helping the security and engineering teams at dozens of high-growth tech companies automate their DevSecOps work and reduce costs.

Now, with its public launch and new funding, the company is rolling out a free community offering for which customers can sign up in a matter of minutes. The offering reflects Bridgecrew's developer-first, community dedication and offers "significant value" to customers, according to CEO Tendler.

The rollout comes amidst a broader trend of software developers, instead of centralized security teams, handling infrastructure security issues inside organizations as code is written and deployed. This is happening as organizations move more IT services and software to the cloud and adopt modern development techniques like infrastructure-as-code. All of this means code and cloud environments are often being created faster and through multiple new platforms, which allows for more security issues to develop.

Bridgecrew's solution addresses this so that anyone, anywhere inside an organization can monitor and automatically remediate cloud infrastructure insecure configurations. Remediations and fixes become a native part of engineers' workflow; they can be accessed through the command line, existing development ecosystems (CI/CD tools such as GitHub or CircleCl), ticketing systems such as Jira, or through consoles.

Bridgecrew has already created dozens of playbooks for AWS configurations as well as Cloudformation and Terraform templates that allow teams to automate fixes for misconfigurations, infrastructure drift, or vulnerabilities in both build-time and run-time environments.

"The current enterprise security model is unsustainable, given the move to cloud-native practices," said Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures. "Although the massive shift to the cloud increases the ‘attack surface' for bad actors, new opportunities are emerging for companies to fight back. Bridgecrew is a leader in this regard as the company enables developers to codify security and make it a part of their core workflows. We are excited to help Bridgecrew redefine the security landscape with this innovative approach."

"There is a tectonic shift in which cloud security is becoming a full responsibility of engineering teams. However, current tools are not developer-friendly and just create more tasks and burdens for the engineers," added Gigi Levy-Weiss, managing partner at NFX. "I have been so impressed with what the Bridgecrew team has built in such a short period of time and how they have shown value to a growing number of developers and customers throughout the globe."