Eureka, an Israeli startup offering holistic security across cloud data stores, announced $8M in seed funding led by YL Ventures with participation from renowned security executives and serial entrepreneurs. Founded by Palo Alto Networks (PANW) veterans Liat Hayun (CEO), former VP of Product Management, and Asaf Weiss (CTO), former Senior Director of Engineering, Eureka enables security teams to mitigate the risk of data loss and theft in multi-cloud environments by gaining control over their organization's entire cloud data security posture and compliance.

Industry leaders and security luminaries who participated in Eureka's seed round include Edna Conway (VP, Security & Risk Officer, Azure Hardware Systems & Infrastructure at Microsoft), David Hannigan (Director of Product Security Assurance at Google Cloud), Andy Ellis (Former CSO at Akamai Technologies), Maarten Van Horenbeeck (CISO at Zendesk), Assaf Rappaport (CEO at Wiz) and Ben Bernstein (Former CEO at Twistlock, acquired by PANW).

Rapid cloud migration is generating tremendous value for forward-thinking organizations, but security teams are struggling to keep up with the pace of data proliferation. Cloud adoption and increased hyperautomation make it easier for businesses to generate and utilize cloud data stores, which often contain sensitive personal, financial and operational information, as well as IP and trade secrets. Unfortunately, while these burgeoning data stores present opportunities for enterprises, they are also growing as increasingly attractive targets for bad actors.

As the volume and value of cloud data rises, so too does the risk associated with this data and the need for enterprises to comply with complex regulation. Many data stores are generated and used within company environments outside of the supervision of security teams, who have neither the visibility nor the tools required to globally track and manage them. Security leaders are voicing their concerns about this growing gap in larger numbers,

"Protecting data in legacy on-premise environments was challenging enough for most enterprises. The cloud revolution brings new opportunities to leverage data at scale-and makes it even more urgent to find scalable approaches to cloud data security," warns Andy Ellis, Former CSO of Akamai Technologies.

Eureka seeks to address this growing challenge, without inhibiting the productivity driving the cloud data expansion, by using the power of automation. The platform provides a seamless discovery and classification mechanism and a unified policy engine that integrates with all of the cloud platforms and processes that organizations use today. It enables data store inventory and contextualization, policy definition and deployment, and risk monitoring and management.

Eureka's solution offers a higher layer of security compared to point solutions and native tools by providing comprehensive and real time views of data stores and the risks associated with them. "We can't avoid multi-cloud environments no matter how chaotic they are for our data security. Eureka is both enabling companies to securely place and leverage their data in the cloud environments of their choice and dramatically easing its management by engineers, security and compliance teams. The fact that they're accomplishing this in a single platform is game-changing," says David Hannigan, Director of Product Security Assurance at Google Cloud.

Having worked as both security experts as well as software developers, Eureka's founding team is looking to leverage their prior experience to offer a new, holistic approach to cloud data security. "Existing solutions involve manual processes and point products that don't scale to the speed or volume at which these data stores are created and used," says Liat Hayun, Eureka's CEO. "And, while most controls might exist natively, organizations are still struggling to use them effectively across their entire data store footprint," she added.

"Eureka's solution will massively impact the way businesses grow through their data," says John Brennan, Partner at YL Ventures. "By offering security leaders the operational powers they require without causing friction to business interests, Liat and Asaf are ushering in an entirely new kind of digital transformation in the coming years. They're enabling companies to leverage any cloud data store they wish while ensuring that security teams maintain full visibility and understanding into the organization's entire cloud footprint, and can easily evolve and manage policy whenever needed."