Israeli software-as-a-service security platform startup Grip Security Ltd. announced today it has raised $19 million in new funding to triple its headcount, accelerate product development and expand its go-to-market efforts in the U.S.

Intel Capital led the Series A round. Also participating in the round was YL Ventures, which led a $6 million seed round into the company in April.

Founded in February this year, Grip offers a SaaS security management platform that brings comprehensive visibility across all enterprise SaaS applications. The company’s automated solution discovers hundreds of shadow applications and thousands of dormant accounts that have ungoverned continued access to customer data, production environments and more, according to the company.

Grip says that using in using its platform, visibility is no longer the sole issue for security teams and Grip’s solution responds accordingly. The service is designed to be quicker and more intelligent than malicious actors that are now ubiquitous in the SaaS environment. It’s intended to provide customers with rapidly deployed solutions for access management and data governance that look beyond cloud access security broker solutions and web gateways.

The company argues that because of rapid adoption over the past decade, SaaS has outgrown traditional ways to manage and contain it. Although these solutions are crucial for business, that reliance creates a new and evolving risk surface. Cloud access security broker solutions,developed in the past decade currently address only the use of a small number of applications and cannot scale fast enough, according to Grip, which says that’s where its solution provides coverage.

“SaaS is self-service, with the barrier of adoption being only a signup form,” explained Lior Yaari (pictured, center, with co-founders Idan Fast, right, and Alon Shenkler, right), co-founder and chief executive officer of Grip Security. “This leaves chief information security officers in a frustrating position. With existing inadequate solutions, CISOs must place barriers to SaaS adoption or prohibit it entirely in order to secure their organization, impeding innovation. We believe a self-service problem requires a self-governing solution.”

Not even 12 months old, Grip has seen rapid growth, its platform deployed by dozens of customers, from small startups to Fortune 500 market leaders trying to regain control over their SaaS environments. That Grip has raised $25 million since its inception, with Intel Capital leading this latest round, indicates that the company is doing something right.

Photo: Grip Security