Oleria raises $33 million to accelerate its product innovation
Oleria has raised $33.1 million in a Series A funding round. This latest investment, which brings the company’s total funding to over $40 million, is led by Evolution Equity Partners with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Tapestry VC, and Zscaler.
This funding round enables Oleria to ramp up hiring to accelerate its product innovation, including AI capabilities, as well as its go-to-market strategy.
“Oleria provides organizations with comprehensive visibility into their access posture and autonomously identifies and mitigates access risks before they can be exploited,” said Jim Alkove, CEO of Oleria. “We are security operators building solutions for operators. Our team’s decades of experience in building and operating security programs at scale at tech leaders like Salesforce, Amazon, and Microsoft allows us to understand the complex challenges CISOs are facing and tailor our solutions to them.”
Industry data shows that 80% of all breaches use compromised identities. Today, most organizations leveraging legacy security solutions must expend significant manual effort to combat these identity-based threats. With organizations adopting an ever-increasing number of interconnected SaaS applications and cloud infrastructure to drive global operations and innovation, security solutions must modernize to meet their complex needs to continuously protect from these growing threats.
“Identity security is the cornerstone of any zero trust security program. Legacy approaches to identity security fail to address the underlying security risk while hurting business agility,” said Punit Minocha, Zscaler’s EVP of Business and Corporate Development. “We are excited to support Oleria in their mission to build an adaptive and autonomous future for identity security that enables organizations to effectively manage risk while innovating at the pace of business.”
According to Gartner, “by 2026, 70% of identity-first security strategies will fail unless organizations adopt context-based access policies that are continuous and consistent.” Oleria’s unique approach to access management enables CISOs to protect data and maintain trust in this dynamic environment without limiting the pace of business with traditional, rigid security constraints.
Oleria’s solution is designed to meet these demands by providing appropriate access to the right users, at the right time, for the right duration, all with a relentless focus on user experience. The solution continuously assesses and validates the people, applications and assets involved in each digital interaction and enables organizations to adapt security to specific context and changing needs.
“The threat landscape is ever-evolving and cybercriminals are becoming more innovative in their attacks thanks to the prevalence of emerging technologies like AI,” said Taher Elgamal, Partner at Evolution Equity Partners and former CTO of Security at Salesforce, who will be joining Oleria’s expanded board of directors as part of this funding round. “Oleria is bringing cybersecurity into the future and keeping pace with the changing landscape by fulfilling a critical, unmet need in identity security.”
In addition to Elgamal, John Watters, former President and COO at Mandiant, will be joining Oleria’s board of directors and investing in the round. Watters will bring a wealth of cybersecurity, go to market, and business operations expertise.
Today’s milestone marks a significant step forward in the company’s mission to redefine identity security just 10 months after launching out of stealth mode and raising a successful $8 million seed funding round led by Salesforce Ventures. Oleria is currently piloting its solution with a diverse group of customers planning for general availability starting in early 2024.
“We’re excited to accelerate Oleria’s growth and product innovation with the expansion of our team here in Bellevue,” said Alkove. “I’m looking forward to delivering the next evolution of adaptive and autonomous identity security solutions to empower companies to stay ahead of evolving threats and maintain their customers’ trust without sacrificing agility.”