Elevate Security announced that 2021 was a year of significant growth for the company, with enterprise annual recurring revenue (ARR) for its SaaS User Security platform increasing nearly four times over the previous year. The company also grew its executive team across sales and marketing with the appointment of Kevin Senator as CRO, Harris Schwartz as Field CISO, and Brian Duckering as VP of Marketing.

Elevate Security's growth comes as the problem of internal user risk has been exacerbated by the shifting workplace environment of the past two years. Security teams are not able to rely on traditional on-prem security measures to protect internal assets, and credentials continue to be one of the most sought after data types. User Security takes a proactive approach to solving the pervasive problem of user risk in the enterprise. An enterprise's internal users are by far the biggest risk to the organization, with 85 to 90 percent of security events resulting from an authorized user's mistake according to a Verizon report, whether simply careless, uninformed, or tricked by a malicious actor.

"The broad shift to work-from-anywhere has changed the dynamics of cybersecurity, with more focus than ever put on individual employees," said Jaclyn Hester, Partner at Foundry Group. "Elevate is the right platform at the right time to address this blind spot in most organizations."

As more companies deal with a distributed workforce, the focus on user risk is increasing. Annual education and training programs aren't enough to close the holes in security that authorized users inevitably leave for attackers to exploit. Users themselves are the target, with their credentials providing cybercriminals with the keys to the enterprise kingdom.

With many incidents stemming from human error, enterprises are turning to Elevate Security to get ahead of the problem and understand where the biggest risks lie in their workforce. Elevate analytics provide the visibility to identify security controls for high-risk groups and inform targeted interventions.

Elevate Security's customer acquisition rate increased steadily across the year, experiencing the most growth in the finance, healthcare, pharma, and technology verticals.

"Our customers consistently tell us that their users are the new perimeter," said Robert Fly, CEO and co-founder. "It's a huge challenge because the more a company grows, the bigger their risk becomes. I want to thank our customers for the privilege of partnering with them to solve this critical problem. We ended last year with no enterprise churn and grew our enterprise revenue by 4x, largely based on the strength of our customer advocates."

Sales and Marketing Growth

To support the growing demand, Elevate Security has expanded its leadership in sales and marketing, appointing the company's first chief revenue officer. Kevin Senator brings more than 35 years of enterprise security sales and general management experience to Elevate, bringing startups to rapid growth and acquisition, including roles at Counterpane, Blue Curve/Red Hat, and Acculogic and most recently as CEO Bayshore Networks. As CRO, Kevin will build the overall sales and business development organization to drive growth through both direct and channel sales along with key technical GTM partnerships.

Harris Schwartz joins Elevate as the company's Field Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), to advise CISOs and executive customers. Prior to joining Elevate Security, Harris was VP, Security Advisory and Practice Leader for Cyber Resilience services at Aon Cyber Solutions. Prior to that, he held an executive advisory role at Nippon Telegraph & Telephone (NTT) in the Security Advisory Services practice running Executive Risk & Advisory, working globally with companies across a variety of industry verticals. Harris is an experienced Information Security executive with over 30 years of private sector experience at companies including Levi Strauss, Safeway, and Disney, developing and implementing comprehensive security, risk, and investigations programs.

Brian Duckering will head up Elevate Security's marketing team as VP of Marketing. Brian brings more than two decades of leadership in enterprise B2B markets to Elevate, holding key roles in marketing, product management, and business development. He has built marketing teams starting at seed and A-round startups, and led industry-changing initiatives that resulted in six successful acquisitions. His experience includes roles at Skycure, AppStream, and Symantec. As Elevate Security VP of Marketing, Brian is building a high-functioning team to support rapid growth and grow industry awareness for how to solve the user risk challenge.

Elevate delivers valuable insider risk insights to identify and respond proactively to the organization's highest risk users. By providing security teams with the visibility and risk scoring necessary to zero in on the most likely source of the next incident, they are able to focus on the most important and effective tasks.