Laminar bosses on the 'huge blind spot' of public cloud data security and why the business is 'very well suited' to partners

CRN speaks to the CEO and CMO of new Israeli cybersecurity vendor Laminar

Laminar, a newly launched cybersecurity vendor which provides public cloud data protection, claims its offering will be "very well suited" to the IT channel and plans to sell through partners.

The Israeli-based firm, which was founded by Israeli Intelligence Corps' Unit 8200 veterans Amit Shaked, CEO, and Oran Avraham, CTO, came out of stealth last month to announce $32m worth of Series A investment in a funding round led by Insight Partners.

CEO Amit Shaked said the vendor is currently working with a "double digit" number of design partners and customers and plans to make its offering generally available "in early 2022".

And the company's chief marketing officer, Andy Smith, said Laminar eventually plans to sell its offering both directly and through the channel, though stressed that it is still in the "development stages" of formulating a partner programme.

"Our target ideal customers are larger enterprises and so it will be traditional security, which is a combination of both (channel and direct selling)," he explained.

"It's very well suited for the channel, especially because its agentless and asynchronous so there's less questions."

"We'll make sure we know exactly how to sell it first and then we can teach others how to sell it."

Laminar dubs its software as an "agentless and asynchronous data security and leakage protection for everything built and run in the cloud" and has so far won a total of $37m worth of funding since its formation.

Shaked believes that there is a "huge blind spot" for businesses running workloads and data in the cloud, which he claims will be "critical" for companies as they continue to move away from on-prem.

"Data protection teams are in a huge need for this kind of solution for data protection in the cloud because organisations today put data at the centre of innovation, and innovation happens on the cloud," Shaked said.

"On the one hand, they want to use this data, they want to leverage the data and democratise it to unlock the full potential of the data. But on the other hand, they also want to protect it.

"There's this tension between wanting to use the rate and leverage in unlocking the full potential and protecting it. So how do you manage this tension? This is where Laminar comes into play. This is exactly what we're designed for."

Laminar is one of many cybersecurity start-ups to come out of Israel in recent years, with Israeli cybersecurity firms raising $3.4bn in the first half of 2021 according to the Israel National Cyber Directorate.

And Shaked believes Laminar can be the latest in a high number of successful companies to come out of the country in the security sector.

"We've seen companies that have grown really, really fast," he added.