Silverfort adaptive authentication, Plurilock behavioral biometrics draw investment

Israeli authentication platform Silverfort has received a $30 million investment in a Series B funding round led by Aspect Ventures that will be spent on business development, staff and product enhancement to meet remote workforces’ demand for secure authentication and access solutions, the company announced.

“We are thrilled to have the support of such great investors who share our vision,” said Hed Kovetz, CEO and co-founder of Silverfort, in a prepared statement. “The increased enterprise adoption of cloud, IoT, BYOD and remote work is creating major challenges for implementing secure authentication and access, and calls for a more unified approach. We are excited to continue on our mission to help more companies leverage identity as their new perimeter, and effectively prevent emerging cyber threats.”

Aspect Ventures’ Mark Kraynark will be part of the company’s board of directors. Other investors present include Citi Ventures, Maor Investments, and the company’s early investors TLV Partners, StageOne Ventures and Singtel Innov8. The overall funding secured this year totals $41.5 milion.

“The shift to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, combined with the dramatic acceleration of remote work is driving the need for secure authentication and access of corporate users beyond the perimeter,” said Aspect Ventures Partner Mark Kraynak in the announcement. “Implementing these security controls system-by-system is no longer realistic. Silverfort brings a disruptive technology that is uniquely designed for the perimeter-less era. We are very impressed by the company’s customer traction, leadership and product vision, and excited to help it accelerate its growth.”

Silverfort’s platform delivers seamless authentication and access policies such as multi-factor authentication, risk-based authentication, and zero trust on-premises and in the cloud, without additional deployments, the company says. The AI risk engine automatically adapts policies based on user behavior to prevent account takeover, ransomware and lateral movement.

“With the shift to remote working, secure employee authentication and access to company networks and systems have grown increasingly important for enterprises,” added Singtel Group CIO William Woo in the announcement. “However, many large enterprises find it difficult to implement such controls across all their different environments quickly. Silverfort’s innovative solution simplifies this process without requiring system modifications, enabling them to save time and costs.”

Silverfort’s innovative technology provides security for homegrown and legacy systems, critical infrastructures, file systems, IoT, command-line interfaces, machine-to-machine access and more. Users can securely migrate existing servers and applications to the cloud without adjustments.

Founded by cybersecurity and cryptography experts Hed Kovetz, Yaron Kassner and Matan Fattal, Silverfort has a global customer pool and has already entered collaborations with top security vendors.

Plurilock further invests in passwordless authentication

Plurilock has secured up to CAD$120,000 (US$90,000) in advisory services and funding from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP) to invest in enhancing its behavioral biometrics technologies for remote passwordless authentication, the company announced.

The technologies will be developed for use in commercial, enterprise and highly regulated cybersecurity ecosystems. Plurilock aims to enable passwordless authentication for computing environments and systems by eliminating all usernames, passwords, USB insertions, or fingerprints and face scans.

“This non-dilutive funding supports our current research and development goals at Plurilock,” said Plurilock CEO Ian L. Paterson in the announcement. “The behavioral biometrics and machine learning technologies at the heart of Plurilock products have always logically pointed toward a passwordless experience, and we’re excited that support from NRC IRAP will enable our effort to ultimately bring that experience to market.”

According to Paterson, future plans include leveraging the company’s behavioral biometrics and invisible authentication know-how to completely phase out login prompts, passwords, dedicated authentication devices and other authentication steps. Users will be instead recognized by monitoring sensors and interactive data generated by computing devices.

In June, Plurilock upgraded its behavior-based multi-factor authentication solution to support standard deployment frameworks Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and OpenID Connect.

Article Topics

access control  |  AI  |  authentication  |  behavioral biometrics  |  biometrics  |  cybersecurity  |  funding  |  Plurilock  |  Silverfort