TrueFort snares $30M Series B to expand zero trust application security solution

As companies try to navigate an ever-changing security landscape, it can be challenging to protect everything. Security startup TrueFort has built a zero trust solution focussing on protecting enterprise applications. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B.

Shasta Ventures led today’s round with participation from new firms Canaan and Ericsson Ventures along with existing investors Evolution Equity Partners, Lytical Ventures and Emerald Development Managers. Under the terms of the agreement Nitin Chopra, managing director at Shasta Ventures will be joining the company board. Today’s investment brings the total raised to almost $48 million.

CEO and co-founder Sameer Malhotra says that TrueFort protects customers by analyzing at each application and figuring out what normal behavior looks like. Once it understands that, it will flag anything that falls outside of the norm. The company achieves this by gathering data from partners like CrowdStrike and from multiple points within the application and infrastructure.

“Once we get this telemetry, whether it’s networks, endpoints, servers or third party partners, we then help the customer build a picture of what those applications are doing and what’s normal behavior. We then help them baseline that, and monitor that in real time with response and real time controls to continue those applications through their normal life cycle,” he said.

Zero trust is a concept where as a matter of policy you assume that you cannot trust any individual or device until the entity proves it belongs on your systems. Malhotra says that customers are becoming more comfortable with the concept and in 2020 the company saw massive 650% revenue growth.

“We are seeing the demand, especially as zero trust is becoming a more familiar vernacular amongst the security community […]. Again, it’s having the visibility and understanding, and then being able to then reduce it to the limited number of acceptable relationships or executions,” he said. And he believes that it all comes down to understanding your applications and how they operate.

The company currently has 60 employees with hopes of reaching 85 or 90 by the end of the year. Malhotra says that as they build the employee base, they are driving to make it diverse at every level.

“We look at diversity across our whole management team, all the way from the board down to our different levels. We are quite aggressive in hiring diverse candidates, whether they’re women or LGBTQ or people of color. And we have focused programs where we work with different universities […] to bring on new employees from a diverse talent pool. We also work with different recruiters from that perspective, and our focus is always to look at a different palette and to make sure that we’re as diverse an organization as we can,” he said.

The company was founded in 2015 by Malhotra and his partner Nazario Parsacala, both of whom spent more than 20 years working at big financial services companies — Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. They worked for a couple of years building the program, launching the first beta in 2017 before bringing the first generally available product to market the following year.

Currently customers can install the solution on prem or in the cloud of their choice, but the company has a SaaS solution in the works as well, that will be ready in the next couple of months.

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