Israeli cloud security startup Sweet Security Technologies Ltd. today announced that it has raised $12 million in new funding and launched a new suite designed to improve cloud security.

Sweet Security’s platform is designed to assist security teams in shutting down cloud attacks when and where they occur with maximum precision and minimal business disruption. The company was founded by retired Brigadier General Dror Kashti, former chief information security officer of the Israel Defense Forces, retired Colonel Eyal Fisher, former head of the Cyber Department at Unit 8200, and Orel Ben-Ishay, former head of the cybersecurity research and development center at Unit 81.

While serving his country, Kashti is said to have found that even though securing development environments is essential, current cloud runtime security solutions are insufficient for preparing a company for a breach. The company argues that existing detection tools only provide limited functionality or aren’t optimized for the cloud and that companies require technological “boots on the ground” to detect attacks that unfold in runtime.

To address issues in cloud runtime security, Sweet has debuted its Cloud Runtime Security Suite. Designed to help CISOs and security teams “level up” their cloud security, the suite provides robust defenses across all stages of an attack.

Sweet’s Cloud Runtime Security Suite features include detection and response, discovery and prevention – all in runtime. The runtime sensor takes under five minutes to deploy and immediately provides cloud-native cluster visibility, streaming key application data and business logic to its servers to profile workload behavior anomalies and contextualize them with traditional tactics, techniques and procedures.

Under the hood, the suite uses a modern attack detection model and auto-learning technology to immediately deliver critical, comprehensive attack findings for mitigation before, during and after attacks occur. The company claims the results give CISOs the technical underpinnings needed to be accountable for cloud security.

“‘Cybersecurity’ and ‘delightful’ are not words that normally go hand in hand, but we want our customers to use them in the same sentence when talking about our solution,” Kashti said in a statement. “If SOC and IR teams don’t have to constantly tune their security products or sift through mountains of alerts, they’ll execute at a higher level and they’ll be happier.”

Glilot Capital Partners LP led the seed round, with CyberArk Ventures LLC Other investors, including Gerhard Eschelbeck, former CISO at Google, and Travis McPeak, who led product security at Databricks Inc., also participated.

Photo: Sweet Security