Secure cloud access startup P0 Security Inc. today announced that it has raised $5 million in new funding and launched into general availability its flagship product for security practitioners to secure cloud access.

Founded in 2022, P0 Security helps security engineers secure cloud access and entitlements for their developers. The product can be used to identify which cloud identities — human or machine — have privileged access, with support for granular, just-in-time and short-lived privileged access granting.

The company designed the product to address issues wherein the shift to cloud-native app development has introduced complexities that present challenges for security teams. P0 argues that the network perimeter isn’t robust enough to secure cloud infrastructure.

The challenges include a shift from a single location to sometimes hundreds of accounts having access to infrastructure from multiple locations and devices. The spread of an organization’s critical resources across multiple clouds, with hundreds of microservices interacting with thousands of ephemeral resources, along with the number of services provided by each cloud provider, has exploded, making security using legacy approaches challenging.

P0 Security’s product overcomes the current practice of using a patchwork of point solutions by offering security engineers a unified offering to secure cloud access for all identities without affecting developer productivity.

The company’s solution provides deep visibility into which identities — whether human or machine — have excessive and possibly dangerous permissions to sensitive cloud resources such as virtual machines, storage buckets, cloud services and production Kubernetes clusters. Security engineers can use P0’s dashboard to right-size roles and permissions for all identities and identify attack paths to critical resources.

Security teams can also use P0 Security to automate privilege access escalations and engineers can use P0’s Slackbot to request just-in-time and time-bound, break-glass access to granular cloud resources. The automation is said to reduce the average approval times from hours to mere minutes across customers.

LightSpeed Venture Partners and SV Angel Management LLC led the $5 million seed round. P0 Security says it will use the funding to build out its solution with additional functionality and to bring it to market. 

“Companies understand the limits of their network perimeter against the backdrop of increasing cloud-native app development, paving the way for P0 Security,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Shashwat Sehgal. “With seed funding and the GA of our solution, P0 Security is the first to address a critical need among businesses for a unified solution to secure access in a cloud-native environment.” 

Image: P0 Security