Cloud security firm Kivera secures $5.1m seed funding

Cloud security startup Kivera has secured $5.1 million in seed funding, to be used for expansion in the North American markets.

Investors chipping in include General Advance, Round 13 Capital, JP Morgan & Chase managing director and head of cloud security Srinath Kuruvadi and other angels and senior executives from Amazon, Google, Shift5, ServiceNow, and Zscaler.

Founded by Vernon Jefferson and Neil Brown four years ago, Kivera supports all major clouds.

This includes the big three, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

The company's Cloud Security Protection Platform (CSPP) enables uniform and granular policy enforcement of controls across any cloud and any tool.

This, Kivera said, eliminates the risk of misconfigurations and ensures the security of an organisation's data.

Kivera said its CSPP disrupts the cycle of alerts by allowing developers to innovate within secure guardrails that prevent risks at build and run-time, minimising the number of alerts and improving their signal to noise.

Brown said that cloud security teams are swamped in a backlog of alerts, and they deserve to get out of triage mode and take control of their cloud security by preventing risk up front.

“When dealing with sensitive workloads, the consequences of a single mistake, such as accidentally exposing a resource to the internet, can be considerable," Brown said.

"Our recent funding is an endorsement that Kivera is tapping into specific customer pain."

"We’re eager to change the way that cybersecurity teams think about cloud security beginning at the configuration level," he added.

The company started up in Sydney originally, but has since then relocated its office to New York to better serve the North American market.