Scaling Strong: Grip Security Raises a $41M Series B Round

Our portfolio company Grip Security, has done it again! Less than 18 months after raising a $19M A Round, Grip is raising a $41M B Round led by Third Point Ventures with participation from YL Ventures, Intel Capital, TSG (The Syndicate Group) and additional investors. This achievement, especially in today’s environment, is a clear testament to their hard-won accomplishments and pursuit of technologic and strategic excellence in a ubiquitous problem space.

We can easily break down Grip’s success by numbers. Bookings have grown 400% since they launched and now include a multitude of Fortune 500 customers. With tens of thousands of SaaS products at employee disposal, and more emerging every day, it isn’t difficult to understand the sheer magnitude of SaaS use and accompanying risks.

SaaS security is top of mind for CISOs. Indeed almost 100% of companies operating today use one or more SaaS solutions, and a growing number of companies rely on SaaS to operate entirely. Yet Gartner claims that as much as 62% of SaaS connected to enterprise environments is unsupervised and Okta has found that only 18% of connected applications are federated with Single Sign On (SSO). Our own findings in the most recent edition of the CISO Circuit confirm this–25% of CISOs we surveyed from our network now prioritize it as an environment for protection.

Founders Lior Yaari (CEO), Idan Fast (CTO) and Alon Shenkler (VP R&D) identified the evolving threat of shadow IT early in 2020 while it was still nascent but already proving to be a massive problem space. Together, they began uncovering a world of unsupervised accounts littering enterprise environments that made clear just how widespread the issue of shadow SaaS had become across businesses of all types and sizes. With CASB as the only alternative solution, which had already proven incapable of addressing the sheer scale of risk of growing SaaS use, Grip pioneered a simpler and more effective solution for finding and addressing these accounts with immediate results.

Grip is a true masterpiece of simplicity and value. From the very outset of its design, ease of deployment and functionality has guided the entire solution-building process. This is not only reflected in the solution’s seamless integration, but also a UI that helps security teams easily monitor and address a comprehensive inventory of shadow IT and cloud accounts (that they would otherwise have to manually chase down). Grip’s Access Manager was built in a similar spirit, helping security teams overcome the shortcomings of password managers while still centralizing control over credential security.

Beyond excellent foresight and an excellent solution, Grip’s leadership has also demonstrated incredible business acuity with a proven track record of balancing strategic investments with execution. It is worth mentioning that Grip Security’s innovation leverages identity as the key control point to help companies embrace SaaS adoption. In other words, Grip’s discovered a critical way for security to help promote business agility and enablement with SaaS, as they no longer have to issue blanket bans on productive third party software and the benefits they can bring.

Grip’s excellent leadership is also reflected in one of the most impressive G2M strategies we’ve recently seen in the cybersecurity industry. They’ve innovated many ways to meaningfully reach customers, such as their Partner Program, which has fostered strong relationships with top-tier channel partners. The genuine desire to help safeguard enterprises and capacity to reach such a wide audience can be directly attributed to the efforts of Grip’s entire executive team, especially Drew Ganther (VP Sales), Young-Sae Song (CMO), Danny Yelin (VP Finance), Shai Gelbaum (VP Product)  and Hila Harkov (VP HR).

Grip has an incredible future ahead. We are so proud of the team and grateful that we have the opportunity to partner with such talented and motivated leaders throughout their incredible building process. Our team’s excitement for Grip is also at least a little personal. CEO Lior Yaari was our very own CTO not too long ago. Also, many members of our team worked very closely with Grip from the company’s very beginnings, supporting ideation, leading their seed round and providing hands-on support across marketing, business development, operations and so much more.  We are all thrilled to be able to keep supporting and watching Grip flourish in our capacity as Grip’s biggest supporters. Grip has an incredible future ahead, and we look forward to many more opportunities to congratulate such an excellent team!