Pitching access management on the fly, Los Angeles-based Britive raises $5.4 million

Published September 10, 2020

It seems Los Angeles is becoming an enterprise software hotspot.

LA saw its first big enterprise exit in recent memory with the recent acquisition of Signal Sciences for $775 million, and less than a month later a hometown startup, Britive has raised $5.4 million from LA’s own venture fund, Upfront Ventures and a clutch of security experts.

LA gets a big SaaS exit as Fastly nabs the Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775M

For chief executive Artyom Poghosyan and chief technology officer Alex Gudanis, Britive is simply the latest initiative in a decades-long effort to reshape security technology.

Both Poghosyan and Gudanis have long histories in identity and access management; back in 2009 Poghosyan founded Advancive Technology Solutions, which was acquired by Optiv in 2015 to bulk up its identity access management service.

Now, he and Gudanis are trying to solve the issues of identity access management that the new, ubiquitous cloud computing model presents for security officers and developers.

“When Optiv acquired us, we were already seeing interesting and strong signals in the technolog space about the disruption that was being driven by cloud technologies,” said Poghosyan.

Those cloud technologies presented new challenges for the kind of privileged access management technologies that Poghosyan had developed.

The solution that Britive pitches is a dynamic model for granting permissions for access, Poghosyan said. Instead of granting permanent access, there are policy-based pre-authorizations that a company can set up defined for specific tasks and roles.

Based on a developer’s role and work, they can request and receive access automatically based on the specific parameters defined by a company or security officer.

The company already has more than a dozen customers using its technology after launching merely two years ago. It’s a customer base that includes one of the world’s largest carmakers and a global clothing brand — companies Poghosyan declined to identify, citing contractual obligations.

The company charges based on the number of users who are requesting permission for access, Poghosyan said.

As more companies move to remote work in the COVID-19 era and distributed teams become the norm, streamlining the provisioning and access management process for companies is going to become even more important.

Undoubtedly, that’s why Britive was able to land investors like Upfront Ventures and why their partner, Kara Nortman, is joining the company’s board of directors. It’s also the reason the company was able to attract some of LA’s leading enterprise executives to back the company, including Andrew Peterson, CEO of Signal Sciences and Dave Cole, CEO of Open Raven.

Signal Sciences secures $35 million investment to protect web apps

Published February 5, 2019

Signal Sciences, an LA-based firm that helps customers secure their web applications, announced a $35 million Series C investment today.

Lead Edge Capital led the round (which seems appropriate, given its name). CRV, Index Ventures, Harrison Metal and OATV also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to around $62 million, according to the company.

The company helps protect web applications like online banking, shopping carts, email or any application you access online. It acts as a protection layer or firewall around the application, Andrew Peterson, CEO and company co-founder told TechCrunch.

“We protect people’s websites or mobile sites. We have software that actually fits in line between the internet and traffic coming into those web applications and all of the data that are behind it,” Petersen explained. It sounds simple enough, but given the onslaught of breaches we have seen across the internet, it’s obviously a difficult problem to solve.

Signal Sciences looks at behavior and tries to determine if it’s malicious. “We combine attack information with behavior about what that attacker is doing.” He says this gives customers a real understanding of the behavior of the attacker and what they’re trying to do against their site, instead of trying to randomly trying to determine if each suspicious activity is an attack or not.

Petersen won’t identify a specific number of customers. He feels it’s a misleading metric because some of his large enterprise customers have multiple business units running almost as independent entities and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the size of the business. He will say that Signal Sciences is protecting more than 10,000 applications involving 1 trillion requests every month from companies like Adobe, Under Armour and WeWork.

The company is up to 150 employees, a number Petersen says has been doubling every year. That trend is expected to continue with this new influx of money. The company wants to get the word out to more customers and help people understand there is a way to attack this problem.

“We started this company to build an innovative technology. We want to continue to drive the bar up for what customers should be expecting from their web protection in the future,” Petersen said.