Today I am excited to share that Spera is emerging from stealth with a $10M seed round, led by YL Ventures. Dor Fledel, Co-founder and CEO, and Ariel Kadyshevitch, Co-founder and CTO, are introducing an Identity Security Posture Management platform that will serve as a single source of truth for identities across the enterprise. Since the company was founded last year, we’ve seen an incredible level of customer interest and deployment velocity, driving home the urgency with which companies need to solve their identity management challenges.
In June 2021, several months after first meeting Dor during a virtual Chicago Booth startup event, my former YLV colleague, Yonit Wiseman, reconnected us just as Dor was considering how to leverage his considerable talents and experience while in business school. Dor was in the process of transitioning from years of service in the Israel Defense Force’s 8200 unit to a more U.S.-focused commercial endeavor, exploring opportunities in VC (for which he interned with our friends at OpenView) and in Product Management, where he dove into the deep end for a summer internship at Google.
Dor and I stayed in good touch, and when we picked up the discussion earlier last year, my only questions were: (1) who are you partnering with? And (2) are you willing to attack a large enough problem? Shortly after, I met Ariel, who lived up to all the “hype” (from Dor and others in our Israeli network), and together we started to dig deep into the identity space with the YLV team and our broader CISO advisory network. Needless to say, the combination of a top-tier team and a painful problem was exactly what we look for in investment opportunities.
I remember a particularly exhilarating lunch in April 2022 (before we had fully validated the space) near Market Street in San Francisco. Dor and I chatted about life – our experiences, our families, our hopes and aspirations – and when we eventually dove into the weeds of cybersecurity space, it was so clear to me that Dor not only had the mind of a cybersecurity technologist but also deeply understood the importance of the customer. There was no BS, no hand-waving – it was all straight to the point: enterprise security teams have a major identity problem, and we (Dor and Ariel) know how to solve it. I walked out of that two-hour lunch so energized that I could hardly contain my excitement in sharing my thoughts with our team.
During that lunch, Dor emphasized three critical priorities as he was thinking about getting Spera off the ground: (1) how to serve customers by addressing their biggest problems, (2) how to form a best-in-class team to build out a product that will solve those problems, and (3) how to find the right partner (investor) for this critical early stage of company growth. The more confident I became in Dor and Ariel’s capacity to succeed in this space, the more I began to focus on showing the guys that we were the right partner to support their ambitions. Dor and Ariel spent time with our marketing team, our HR department, our investment team and our advisors – all now key cogs in YLV’s support of Spera’s mission. In May 2022, shortly before we closed our seed investment, Dor and I set up a small dinner in Chicago with five of YLV’s closest advisors, and I got to see him in action – not telling customers what they needed, but asking them carefully-considered questions and aiming to understand what their problems were. Clearly, the wheels were already turning as to how to solve those problems in a differentiated way.
As early-stage investors, sometimes we really have to drive home the importance of relationship-building with first-time founders. With Dor and Ariel, it was clear that we had very little coaching to do in this department. Both in our more formal calls with advisors, as well as during the more social and organic interactions with some of our friends in the security community, the feedback came in consistently strong: these are the kind of founders people want to see succeed – and they were genuinely interested in mitigating risk with a level of empathy and understanding that can’t be faked. Dor and Ariel have everything we look for both as individuals and as a team.
Dor and Ariel’s own experience, as well as their countless conversations with customers and practitioners, made it clear that identity security was THE place in which they wanted to build. Identity is a foundational element of every organization’s security posture and customer conversations made it very clear that identity posture remains an unsolved challenge. Personally, I love big, “boring” problems that tend to generate the reaction of “huh, why hasn’t that been solved yet?” Identity is as big and as boring as they come! CISOs (many of them, our Advisors) have told us for years that one of the most frustrating vendor-related challenges of managing security programs is knowing that there are security tools on which you spend a significant part of your budget, yet those tools don’t always actually solve an overarching problem in a comprehensive way. Organizations spend exorbitant amounts of money on IAM solutions but they are still unable to adequately answer the most fundamental identity questions: Who is accessing what? How many unique identities do we have? Where are these identities located and why do they have the permissions they have? These are the exact questions that Spera answers today for customers, and that is precisely why we’ve seen nearly unprecedented customer excitement in reaction to their approach.
Spera’s initial value proposition is brilliant in its simplicity: building a comprehensive identity inventory across an entire organization. From there, we are already seeing a myriad of customer-driven use cases and priorities – the challenge isn’t “what else can Spera do for customers?”, rather it’s “what amazing feature are we going to prioritize next?” This is a great problem to have!
I can’t speak highly enough about Dor, Ariel and their growing team. The combination of brilliance and humility, as well as the cohesiveness and dedication of the Spera organization, is so hard to find – but in this case, it was always clear to me that Dor and Ariel were up to the challenge. We are still in the embryonic stages of our company-building journey with Spera, but we are already extremely grateful that a team this special would choose YL Ventures to support them on this adventure, and we are honored to be able to continue to do so moving forward, in the good times and the bad, as they change the way organizations think about identity security.
