Our portfolio company Polyrize raised $4M in a seed financing round led by us, Glilot Capital Partners. As investors, we are often asked for the reasons for investing in a certain company. Therefore, we decided to shed some light on this recent investment and explain why we believe this could be another great addition to our portfolio.

While the decision-making process of investment is hardly trivial, there are a few keys that we look for when we make an investment. With Polyrize, as with most other portfolio companies, we focused on three main aspects: market, technology and most importantly, the team.

The market: Security teams have lost control

We at Glilot have made a habit of investing in innovative cyber defense companies — and Polyrize is another great example. The company’s novel technology solves a key flaw in contemporary organization’s cyber defenses, by addressing the matter of malicious entities abusing legitimate credentials.

The main problem in the industry today is that security departments no longer have centralized control. The strong move to the cloud means more solutions and less control to the security teams. With so many SaaS and IaaS solutions being utilized within organizations, it is quite common to see a single department within an organization that manages the permissions for the cloud-based apps they use — sometimes without even coordinating with IT or security teams.

The present situation opens the door to various forms of outsider abuse and has taken much of the power away from security departments. While many cybersecurity companies address this issue by focusing on user authentication upon login, Polyrize takes a different, contextual-analysis-based approach. Polyrize approach aligns very nicely with other Zero Trust technologies to create a more secure cloud environment to current and future enterprises.

The technology: The Last Line of Defense

Today, the main line of defense for organizations is using various authentication factors to verify users. However, as mentioned above, if a malicious entity is able to obtain legitimate credentials, there is little that can be done once they are logged in. Polyrize solves this problem by constantly monitoring authorizes identities across any IaaS and SaaS environment — even after the employee has logged in.

Moreover, Polyrize presents a visual analysis of each user’s permissions and access capabilities, giving security teams a much-needed reference and an easy-to-follow representation of user permissions. Polyrize gives security teams centralized visibility into assigned privileges to prevent access abuse or misuse of business-critical information.

By correlating permissions and identity behavior, Polyrize serves as the last line of the cyberdefense for organizations. It doesn’t matter if someone’s credentials are 100% legitimate: even if they managed to break past the two-factor authentication mechanism, there’s still no way to mimic the behavior of the user.

The team: People You Can Trust

While it is somewhat of a cliche nowadays, it is still very true that we invest in people. Having a solid, talented team is something that is paramount to any business’ success — and Polyrize is no different. Even without knowing the individuals behind Polyrize, it is obvious that their solution is based on creative thinking and advanced technical know-how.

Luckily, we did get to know them and found a great team of individuals, who are extremely talented, solution-oriented, and overall pleasant to work with. A great team, addressing a known, highly relevant issue, using cutting-edge technology is worth investing in. Therefore, we are proud and pleased to have Polyrize as part of our portfolio, and we have no doubt that they will make many organizations much more secure and give security and IT teams a solution they desperately need.