Elemental Raises Third Round Of Funding To Grow Security Compliance Management Product Market Expansion
SAN MATEO, Calif. June 20, 2005 Elemental Security, Inc., a company pioneering new technology in enterprise information security, today announced it has closed its Series C round of financing, raising approximately $11 million. Lehman Brothers Venture Partners led the investment round, with original investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Mayfield and Sequoia Capital increasing their investment participation as well.
Elemental delivers the world’s only product that unifies policy management, host configuration and network access control in one seamlessly integrated offering. For the first time, enterprises can easily express cross-platform security policies that affect individual computers and their behavior on the network, gather meaningful up-to-date information to compare to established metrics, and selectively enforce policies across a diverse, dynamic environment. Security compliance has become a top priority for enterprises due to pressures from increasing frequency and severity of security breaches, and from regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Elemental also announced that Brian Paul, Partner at Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, has been named to its Board of Directors. Mr. Paul joins existing board members David Cowan, general partner at Bessemer Venture Partners; Robin Vasan, managing director at Mayfield; Sameer Gandhi, partner at Sequoia Capital; Douglas Merrill, senior director of information systems at Google, Inc.; Dayne Myers, Elemental co-founder; Peter Watkins, Elemental CEO; and Dan Farmer, Elemental co-founder and CTO.
“Today’s investment climate requires a determined focus on real customer value and a clear differentiation in the crowded security space – and Elemental has both of these attributes,” said Brian Paul. “The Elemental products provide visibility into enterprises’ ever-changing computing environments that is unmatched in the industry, and address increasing security and compliance issues in ways not seen in the industry before. We are excited by the innovative value the Elemental policy-based security solution brings to the enterprise.”
“Industry and customer validation have been most encouraging for us since we launched the company earlier this quarter,” said Elemental CEO Watkins. “We are pleased to have Lehman Brothers lead this Series C investment, which will allow us to further penetrate our key markets and deliver valuable security compliance solutions to a broader set of customers. Having a leading global investment bank such as Lehman Brothers join the prestigious VC firms backing us is great validation of the progress we have made and the market acceptance we have seen. The valuable perspective that Brian Paul brings to our Board of Directors will serve us well moving forward as we expand our addressable markets and product offerings.”
Elemental approaches security compliance by uniquely placing an emphasis on policy. Elemental delivers a Unified Policy Infrastructure, tightly coupling the expression, monitoring, and enforcement of security policies across heterogeneous platforms and across multiple layers of individual computers (including by OS, application, hardware, software, and network activity). Powering this unified framework is Fuel, the first and only purpose built security policy language. With no programming experience required, organizations can easily express policies in a manner that more closely resembles how they were written in a security policy document, without worrying about implementation details or platform-specific issues.
Elemental enables important security compliance management capabilities, including dynamic host groupings that keep pace with ongoing network changes and provide a view of the environment that reflects clear business process, organizational, and IT administrative context. Dynamic groupings are derived from the rich set of information learned from the Elemental agents about their host computer and other computers on their network segment that describes in detail the configuration and activity of machines. As individual computers experience changes in their configuration or behavior, the dynamic grouping mechanism automatically assigns them into groups and immediately deploys the appropriate policies and access controls for those groups.
About Elemental
Elemental Security is a pioneer in the Security Compliance Management market. Elemental’s products address enterprises’ need to centrally manage the security compliance of all computers in their environments. Elemental provides unified visibility and control to manage dynamic computing environments, enabling enterprises to satisfy compliance requirements and measurably improve their security. Founded in December 2002, Elemental is a privately held company backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Mayfield, Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., and has offices throughout the U.S. Go to http://www.elementalsecurity.com for more information.