Zero-trust networking startup Lumeus.ai, officially known as Okulis Inc., is launching today armed with $6 million in seed funding.

The round was led by Tola Capital and saw participation from pre-seed investors Emergent Ventures and First Rays Ventures.

Lumeus.ai is the creator of what it says is a “Universal Zero-Trust platform” that employs artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to help companies increase visibility into their networking environments, spanning on-premises and cloud. The platform serves as a central console for authorizing access to resources and segmenting network traffic in order to prevent lateral movement that could aid malicious attacks.

Zero trust is a security concept popularized by Google LLC that centers on shifting access controls from the perimeter, as with traditional firewall-based security, to individual devices and users. The main idea is to enable employees to work securely from any location without the need for a traditional virtual private network.

With zero trust, access control is no longer based on whether users are requesting that access from inside or outside the corporate network. Instead, the model assumes that users requesting access from inside the network are just as untrustworthy as those seeking remote access, so access requests are instead granted based on details about the particular users, their jobs and the security status of the devices they’re using.

Lumeus.ai co-founder and Chief Executive Satish Veerapuneni (pictured, left, alongside co-founder Saurabh Jain) told SiliconANGLE that the platform leverages the same console to manage multiple use cases such as zero-trust network access, zero-trust segmentation, application virtualization infrastructure and application experience management.

One of the most notable things about Lumeus.ai’s zero-trust platform is that it’s agentless, meaning it can be deployed on top of an organization’s existing infrastructure with ease. “Agentless matters because it makes deployment faster and allows companies to see value sooner in a matter of minutes, rather than months,” Veerapuneni said.

The other notable aspect of Lumeus.ai is its use of AI to profile network and application behavior in order to identify anomalies across domains between the network and each application. According to Veerapuneni, this is historically done by third-party network monitoring tools, but Lumeus.ai eliminates the need for them.

A third advantage of Lumeus.ai is that it enables teams to create unified policies for multiple zero trust use cases. Veerapuneni said this can be hugely advantageous to enterprises that operate hundreds of on-premises sites and cloud environments. In such cases, the number of individual policies overwhelms operations teams.

“The sheer scale of these policies across sites and clouds are in the order of thousands, and managing these across multiple platforms becomes a challenge when you don’t have one single policy construct to help describe them,” Veerapuneni said. “Lumeus.ai helps by first analyzing the network and then defining the policy in one unified console without the necessity of learning multiple constructs across platforms.”

In future, Lumeus.ai will introduce further use cases for AI, such as recommending which zero trust polices to implement based on traffic and network fingerprinting.

“By observing network traffic patterns for segments of devices and users, we can suggest policies that administrators can include or exclude with a simple click of a button,” Veerapuneni said. “In an enterprise that leverages technologies like SD-WAN, next-gen firewalls, cloud and Secure Access Service Edge, most of this traffic and network fingerprinting can be done by leveraging APIs from these platforms and without installing any agents or sensors.”

According to Veerapuneni, the main benefit of Lumeus.ai is that it enables enterprises need quickly and easily to provision zero-trust access, zero-trust segmentation and application experience management. It also helps reduce complexity for operations teams by consolidation multiple management consoles into one. Moreover, because organizations leverage their existing infrastructure, Veerapuneni said, Lumeus.ai can achieve cost savings of up to 50%.

The startup stressed the importance of implementing a zero-trust approach to security, citing a study by Verizon Communications Inc. that found the increase in ransomware attacks last year was as big as the previous five years combined. It cites a second study by IBM Corp., which shows that organizations with a mature zero-trust program can save an average of $1.5 million per data breach. So there’s a clear need for organizations to properly implement zero-trust security.

Lumeus.ai said it’s keen to grow its customer base, and will use the funds from today’s round to build out its product and expand its go-to-market teams in the U.S. and in India.

Tola Capital Vice President Will Coggins said he’s betting on Lumeus.ai because he believes there’s a big opportunity for AI-powered zero trust networking. “The team at Lumeus.ai has the right DNA to tackle this market and we’re excited to guide its go-to-market efforts,” he said.

Images: Lumeus.ai