Remediant Inc., developer of a new breed of access control software called privileged access management, today announced that it has raised $15 million in a new funding round.

The Series A investment led by Dell Technologies Capital and Forgepoint Capital Management LLC will go toward marketing and field operations, product engineering and channel development.

Founded four years ago, Remediant has relied on bootstrapped funding to this point, aided in large part by a major contract it signed with Lockheed Martin in late 2017. The company said its revenue quintupled last year but didn’t provide specifics.

Privileged access management or PAM, which Gartner Inc. last year named the top priority for enterprise cybersecurity managers, addresses the problem of the profusion of administrator-level accounts that exist in most large organizations. Such privileges are often granted on a one-off basis but then never revoked, creating a gaping security hole should attackers compromise the credentials.

The state of access management in most large organizations is “pretty massively out of control,” said Paul Lanzi, co-founder and chief operating officer of Remediant. He said one unnamed customer with about 10,000 computers across its network was found to have more than 12 million accounts with some level of administrative control.

“That’s totally the norm in large enterprises,” he said. “Customers are usually astounded to find out what access privileges are out there.”

Remediant’s SecureOne technology works by scanning computers on a network to identify which accounts have privileged access. Those privileges are then stripped and reassigned on an as-needed basis. “You log in using two-factor authentication, hit one button and we enable admin rights for a limited period of time,” Lanzi said. Stolen credentials are effectively useless to attackers outside of the short window of effectiveness defined by policies.

Lanzi said the company’s agentless technology takes a few hours to install and can scan “a couple of hundred thousand computers” in about two hours. The software is deployed on-premises, with a software-as-a-service version planned to complement the base package. Lanzi also said the company is eyeing expansion into other access-control domains, such as databases and cloud control panels.

“Remediant impressed us from day one with their ability to mobilize and quickly scale a PAM solution to secure more than 150,000 endpoints,” Lockheed Martin Chief Information Security Officer Mike Gordon said in a statement.

Forgepoint’s participation in the funding is a particularly important validation for the technology because of the venture firm’s “extensive identity access management experience,” Lanzi said. So was the validation of Lockheed Martin, which “had never publicly worked with a software product before or since,” he said. Gartner recently named Remediant a “cool vendor” in identity and access management.

Photo: Yuri Yu. Samoilov/photopin cc