Four-time Google 'Capture the Flag' champions take security startup out of stealth with $32m funding round

Laminar will provide 'agentless and asynchronous data security and leakage protection for everything built and run in the cloud'

Laminar, a brand-new data security startup, has come out of stealth to announce $32m worth of Series A investment.

The company has been founded by Israeli Intelligence Corps' Unit 8200 veterans and four-time Google Capture the Flag champions Amit Shaked, CEO, and Oran Avraham, CTO.

It will deliver "agentless and asynchronous data security and leakage protection for everything built and run in the cloud", the Israeli-based firm says.

The funding round was led by New York-based global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, with participation from SentinelOne, TLV Partners and Meron Capital, and brings the company's total funding to $37m.

"We've already built a truly world-class team of both offensive and defensive security engineers, and I'm proud to be working with and recruiting some of the best in the world," Avraham said.

"Part of the joy of working at Laminar is being side-by-side with these amazing individuals. I'm excited to continue to build-out an elite team of engineers and researchers that will help enable our customers to detect and prevent some of the most sophisticated attacks."

Laminar says it will use the round of funding to expand its engineering department, build-out its go-to-market team and establish a "world-class" data security research team.

It claims to offer an "industry-first public cloud data protection solution" which will allow users to discover and classify sensitive data continuously for complete visibility, provide security and control to improve risk posture and detect and remediate leaks without interrupting data flow.

The startup will use cloud-native approaches that are "agentless and asynchronous" which it says will allow "complete, autonomous data observability, including within shadow datastores".

"As organisations rapidly transition to the cloud and build applications cloud-first, businesses are moving at record pace," Shaked said.

"These transformations often make life easier. However, for CISOs and data security professionals, their job is more difficult than ever before, and data protection teams are left in the dark."