Cloud security vendor Mitiga lands $45M, valuing the company at over $100M

Companies moved en masse to the cloud during the pandemic, under pressure to digitally transform. According to a 2021 survey from O’Reilly, cloud adoption steadily rose across industries, with 90% of organizations using cloud computing compared to 88% in 2020.

The accelerated cloud adoption led to a rise in security issues. In a recent poll of U.K. executives by PwC, cloud-related risks were top of the cybersecurity agenda, with 39% respondents expecting such security risks to "significantly affect" their organization in the coming months.

For some startups, that's been good for business. See: Mitiga, a cloud security firm that offers a subscription-based service to help companies prepare for cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) attacks. Mitiga today announced that it raised $45 million in a Series A round led by ClearSky Security with participation from Samsung Next, Blackstone, Atlantic Bridge and DNX.

Co-founder and CEO Tal Mozes says that the fresh cash will be put toward product development and expanding Mitiga's 56-person workforce. The Series A values Mitiga at over $100 million.

"The pandemic accelerated cloud and SaaS adoption without growing organizations' capabilities and talent at the same rates, in order to successfully handle a rising tide of cloud and SaaS incidents," Mozes told TechCrunch in an email interview. "This inequity created a huge need to build a scaled solution -- and that's exactly what we did. The company is well-positioned today to run for years without additional funds if needed."

Tel Aviv-based Mitiga was founded in 2019 by Mozes, Ofer Maor and Ariel Parnes, a retired colonel from Israel Defense Forces. Mozes and Maor previously spearheaded Hacktics, a penetration test company that was acquired by Ernst & Young over a decade ago, and Seeker Security, an app security automation product Synopsys bought in 2015.

Mozes says that the team was initially motivated by a desire to fill what they saw as a gap in the incident response industry: solutions designed for cloud and SaaS. The segment, he avers, is still dominated today by professional services companies applying old-school approaches to cloud cybersecurity.