Grip Security Raises $25M in 9 Months to Displace Legacy CASB Solutions

Led by Intel Capital, Grip’s Series A round will accelerate its product development and support its rapid growth in the US

In one of the fastest Series A funding rounds of the year, Grip Security, a SaaS security startup founded in February 2021, has secured a total of $25M since its inception. The new $19M Series A round was led by Intel Capital with participation from existing investor YL Ventures, who led Grip’s $6M seed round in April this year.

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“With Grip, one can gain rapid visibility into the organization’s SaaS portfolio and provide an intuitive way to enhance governance and control, without slowing the speed of our business partners.”

Due to rapid adoption over the past decade, SaaS outgrew the traditional ways to manage and contain it. Organizations today rely on hundreds, if not thousands of business-critical applications, with access to all sensitive organizational assets production environments, customer data, sales information, source code and more.

While crucial for business, this reliance creates a new and evolving risk surface. CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) solutions, developed in the past decade, can only currently address the use of a small number of applications and cannot scale fast enough. Existing technology must be changed from the core, redesigned and built to secure this SaaS sprawl. Grip’s modern architecture rises to the challenge and provides security teams with comprehensive visibility and control over every SaaS in use by the organization, including shadow applications, without resulting in performance degradation or interference.

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“SaaS is self-service, with the barrier of adoption being only a signup form,” says Lior Yaari, CEO and co-founder of Grip Security. “This leaves CISOs in a frustrating position. With existing inadequate solutions, CISOs must place barriers to SaaS adoption or prohibit it entirely in order to secure their organization, impeding innovation. We believe a self-service problem requires a self-governing solution.”

Grip’s automated solution discovers hundreds of shadow applications and thousands of dormant accounts that have ungoverned continued access to customer data, production environments and more. Visibility is no longer the sole issue for security teams and Grip’s solution responds accordingly. Grip was devised to be quicker and smarter than malicious actors that are now ubiquitous in the SaaS environment and provide customers with rapidly deployed solutions for access management and data governance that look beyond CASBs and web gateways.

In the past nine months, Grip’s solution has been deployed by dozens of customers, from small startups to Fortune 500 market leaders, who are regaining control over their SaaS environment. The enthusiastic validation of Grip’s solution in such a short period of time is an indication of a previously unfulfilled industry need for automated detection, governance and control over a seemingly uncontrollable and rapidly evolving SaaS universe. “As an organization, we increasingly use SaaS-based applications to be flexible, agile and operate at digital speed, but no other security solutions allowed us to retain that flexibility while also protecting our environment and data,” says Doug Graham, Chief Trust Officer at global content leader Lionbridge. “With Grip, one can gain rapid visibility into the organization’s SaaS portfolio and provide an intuitive way to enhance governance and control, without slowing the speed of our business partners.”

“Grip has identified what SaaS security teams were lacking and has provided them with a viable, accessible and impactful solution,” said Sunil Kurkure, Managing Director at Intel Capital. “With existing products taking months to deploy and interfering with innovation and scale, Grip’s quick and easy deployment process has the potential to change the way SaaS security interacts with business workflows.”

“Grip’s customer base has increased dramatically, with a tenfold increase in new users quarter over quarter. This demonstrates the team’s exceptional execution of their vision,” says Ofer Schreiber, Partner at YL Ventures. “CASB solutions are a thing of the past. Organizations realize that the ever-growing SaaS sprawl requires an entirely new approach in both size and scope. Grip elegantly upends existing band-aid solutions and is poised to become one of the leading SaaS security solutions in the market.”

Grip Security was founded by Lior Yaari (CEO), Idan Fast (CTO), and Alon Shenkler (VP R&D) in February 2021. With its latest funding round and a total of $25M in capital raised, Grip intends to triple its headcount in 2022 from 25 employees today to more than 75, accelerate product development and expand its go-to-market in the US.