Asset discovery startup Lucidum officially launched on Friday, raising $4 million in seed funding from GGV Capital and Silicon Valley CISO Investments.
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Lucidum helps companies identify everything in their enterprise. The way CEO Joel Fulton puts it, the problem at hand is like a child being afraid of the dark–or fear of the unknown.
“When I grew up and became a CISO (chief information security officer), it turns out you never shake that fear,” Fulton said. “And for people who lead cloud, or IT or security, the things that we manage well are the things that we know we have.”
Lucidum’s asset discovery function allows companies to get rid of blind spots across its cloud, security, and IT operations. Lucidum uses machine learning against pre-existing data to triangulate and identify technology assets, according to a statement from the company. With many employees working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, knowing what assets are in an enterprise’s system is even more important. The company’s platform, for example, can tell if an employee’s child’s iPad is connected to Salesforce when it shouldn’t be.
“It’s not just to enumerate the things in the data center, now it’s ‘Tell me on a live basis what is touching my stuff and if it should be,’” Fulton said.
The company was founded by Fulton, the former CISO at Splunk, and Charles Feng, the former head of security innovations and data science at Splunk. Fulton and Feng began talking about starting a company about four years ago and asked CISOs and CIOs what their “magic wand” problem was, and many said it was that they didn’t know what all was in their enterprise.
“Those unknowns prevent digital transformations, they prevent operational excellence and they are devastating for security,” Fulton said.
The funding will be used to invest in engineering and product, Fulton said. Lucidum has about 12 employees now and plans to double its headcount in the next year, but in that doubling, probably only one new hire won’t be directly supporting products and consumers, according to Fulton.
“We want to be a product-focused company,” Feng said. “We are not going to be marketing and sales focused. We want to deliver the product and deliver good customer experience to make the customer happy.”
Lucidum is only available to a limited number of early-access customers, but a community edition will be available in the first quarter of next year.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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