Meet the cybersecurity start-up backed by a host of tech CEOs
Confluera was founded by Juniper, Rubrik and Oracle engineers and came out of stealth with $9m investment
Real-time cybersecurity start-up Confluera plans to use its $9m (£7.4m) Series A funding from high-profile investors to build its product and go to market, CEO Abhijit Ghosh told CRN.
Ghosh (pictured above, centre), who previously led the engineering team at Juniper Networks, co-founded the company last year with Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha and former Oracle and LinkedIn architect Niloy Mukherjee.
Palo Alto-based Confluera describes itself as "combining machine comprehended threat detection with accurately tracked activity trails to stop cyberattacks in real time".
It came out of stealth earlier this month with a host of high-profile investors including Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks; Frank Slootman, former chief exec at ServiceNow; and Ravi Mhatre, founder of private equity firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.
John Thompson, chairman of Microsoft's board and former Symantec CEO, also invested in the start-up when he was approached as he agreed with Confluera's founders that there was a need for a product like this in the market.
"As we look into the security space, you find that there are several point solutions and it was very clear that these are not enough to catch advanced attackers as they're making progress in enterprise infrastructure," Ghosh explained.
"We wanted to address this challenge of how visibility from different security solutions and the insights that are coming out of them need to be combined in a holistic way.
"The current paradigm of trying to figure out something more by post-fact analysis is not working and we want to bring a real-time aspect to be able to combine these insights to figure out how an attack is progressing."
Confluera is targeting mid-market customers and is also engaging in talks with enterprise organisations, though Ghosh added that the problem its platform is addressing applies "across the board" when it comes to company size, as well as verticals.
It has established a direct channel model, but the chief exec declared that establishing an indirect channel is on the cards, though it is still early days for the firm.
Ghosh named Splunk among its competitors but added that Confluera provides an offering that other security information management firms don't.
"It's all about that progression from the initial foothold to the final target," he explained. "When that happens, it is key to really understand that attack progression.
"We bring an ability to look at granular system events and entities and establish a causal relationship between them to understand an activity progression.
"Then we take security information from different sources, some of which are our own capabilities in terms of behavioural detections and anomaly detection based on machine learning and at the same time, we take results from other security sources, such as firewalls, anti-virus, etc.
"We take all this information, and we map it contextually to this activity progression that we have established to be able to risk-score them and rank them and then wipe out a sequence that is looking bad, and we do all this in a real-time manner.
"That is the key difference that we are bringing, compared with anything else that's out there."