The stealthy business security company Apprity, launched by two former Oracle employees, has raised $8 million in its first institutional financing.
For its first venture round, Apprity turned to seasoned security technology investors Promod Haque, a senior managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, and Gaurav Garg, a founding partner of Wing Ventures.
The last time these two investors came together on a deal, the result was the tech security darling FireEye, which held its initial public offering in September 2013, nine years after its launch.
“The reality is most traditional approaches involve a perimeter-centric mindset, whether it is proxy-based or server-based,” said Apprity’s Chief Executive Rohit Gupta, who previously worked as VP of Products in the identity management and security group at Oracle.
With the new funding, Apprity is going to make a huge hiring push around its engineering and research and development teams, Gupta said. “Close to 98 percent of our projected spend is in core engineering and research.”
For NVP’s Haque, the decision to back Apprity’s vision was a function of the previous experience of the two founders. “With the many years of experience that these gentlemen have, it gives them a very interesting vantage point to assess the weaknesses of other systems and build something different.”
What that different product is, neither Haque nor Gupta would say, but Gupta did say that the research the company is doing “centers on the ability to go into much deeper and finer levels of granularity researching threat patterns in the cloud.”
Businesses want to trust but verify when they move to the cloud, according to Gupta. Whatever tools Apprity is developing must be designed to handle the verify component, because as billions of dollars worth of cloud-based software subscriptions show, companies are already putting a lot of their trust in the cloud.
Photo via Flickr user CarbonNYC.