Sonrai Nabs $20M Series B To Secure Public Clouds

Cloud security startup Sonrai Security has raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Menlo Ventures.

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Sonrai Security, which is based in New York, operates a service for enterprise identity and data governance for public clouds like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Kubernetes. The company’s graphing technology helps identify and eliminate risks associated with identity, data and cloud platforms. 

The way technology is built has changed, with a lot of the new ways of building applications done in public cloud environments, CEO Brendan Hannigan said. That means security has to change, too.

“If we’ve reinvented how we build technology, we must reinvent how we secure these clouds,” Hannigan said.

The new funding will be used to expand the research and development, and sales and marketing teams. The company expects to at least double its employee base this year and next, and will also be looking into expanding key partnerships and building an ecosystem of partners, Hannigan said.

Menlo Ventures previously invested in Q1 Labs, which Hannigan led as CEO before it was acquired by IBM. So after working with Hannigan previously, Menlo Ventures Partner Venky Ganesan referred to the choice to invest in Sonrai Security as a “two-minute decision.”

“When they said they were going to do something around the cloud, something around the multi cloud, security, it really fit in with our thesis,” Ganesan said. “We couldn’t wait to send that check.”

The pandemic has highlighted how important cloud technology is, Ganesan said, and that makes security critical. 

“The center of gravity in the security world is moving to the cloud and identities, and what Sonrai is doing is playing into that trend,” Ganesan said. 

Polaris Partners, a founding investor in the company, also participated in the round, as did Ten Eleven Ventures, which led Sonrai Security’s $18.5 million Series A in January 2019.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias