Cybersecurity startup Luminate Security is exiting stealth mode today, having secured $14 million in a combined seed and Series A round of funding.

U.S. Venture Partners and Aleph Venture Capital led the rounds, which were also backed by Microsoft’s ScaleUp program for startups.

Luminate was founded in January 2017 by Israeli cybersecurity experts who previously served with their country’s elite military technological units. The founders have also worked with leading Israeli security firms Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. and Adallom Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2015.

Given their extensive background, it’s not much of a surprise that Luminate’s founders believe traditional security products come with some glaring weaknesses. Traditional security systems such as virtual private networks, corporate firewalls and demilitarized zones may have served on-premises installations well. But in the era of hybrid cloud environments these technologies have quickly become obsolete, the founders say.

“Managing and updating all these solutions used to be a resource-heavy endeavor,” the company said in its pitch. “With the adoption of hybrid cloud data centers, it has become impossible to effectively secure corporate resources in this manner.”

With that, Luminate is touting an altogether more sophisticated approach to security that relies on controlling access to corporate data centers, be they on-premises or in the cloud.

Luminate’s security product is based on the “BeyondCorp” philosophy first developed at Google LLC. BeyondCorp is a so-called “zero trust” security framework that shifts access controls from the perimeter to individual devices and users, allowing employees to work securely from any location without the need for a traditional virtual private network.

Basically what Luminate is doing is delivering BeyondCorp “as-a-service,” providing a security governance framework that shores up corporate networks while allowing employees to safely access the resources they need from any device.

“Luminate’s solution takes the BeyondCorp philosophy as a starting point and transforms security in corporate IT networks,” said Luminate Chief Executive Officer Ofer Smadari (pictured). “Luminate provides a unified security stack on all environments that allows only point-to-point, ad-hoc user access to specific corporate resources, wherever they are hosted. At no point in time is the corporate network exposed.”

Luminate also borrows concepts from the “software-defined perimeter framework.” These frameworks are based on the Department of Defense’s “need-to-know” model, which specifies that all endpoints attempting to access a given infrastructure must be authenticated and authorized prior to entrance.

Once authorization — which takes place in the cloud — is complete, trusted devices are given a unique, temporary cryptographic connection to the target infrastructure. Luminate offers this graphic illustrating how it controls user access to public clouds:

“Luminate’s unique approach operates on the application level,” Smardari added. “It is agentless and, therefore, can be adopted quickly by large populations of corporate role-players, without forcing a disruptive change in the organization’s existing architecture, user permissions and applications.”

Luminate said it plans to use the new funds to expand its operations in the U.S. and develop its customer base.

Images: Luminate