Los Angeles-based Open Raven raises $15 million from KPCB for its security tech to secure hybrid clouds

Open Raven, the Los Angeles-based security startup founded by a team of cybersecurity veterans from CrowdStrike and SourceClear, has closed on $15 million in new financing only four months after emerging from stealth and in the middle of a global pandemic.

The company already boasted an impressive roster of investors well-versed in enterprise software and cybersecurity including Upfront Ventures; Goldman Sachs' chief information risk officer, Phil Venables; RSA's former chief strategy officer, Niloo Razi Howe; and the cybersecurity company Signal Sciences, whose chief executive, Andrew Peterson, is a Los Angeles native.

Now, the company has added to its haul with new capital and the cybersecurity expertise of Kleiner Perkins' deep knowledge in the space through investors like Ted Schlein and Bucky Moore, who will be taking a seat on the company's board of directors.

Investors' confidence in Open Raven's potential stems from the simple fact that a majority of all databases will be accessed from a cloud platform within the next two years, according to data from Gartner Inc. and provided by the company.

These databases may exist on several different service providers cloud computing platforms making it that much more difficult to secure and track the data as it's accessed by different users. Put simply, data security tools weren't built to handle this kind of data fluidity across multiple services. These instances of what Open Raven calls data sprawl: can lead to misconfigurations that have become one of the biggest security threats, according to a study by TechCrunch's parent company, Verizon.

Today's data security problem bears little resemblance to the historical challenges that drove the creation of the last generation of products," said KPCB's Moore, in a statement.

Co-founded by Crowdstrike's former chief product officer, Dave Cole, and the founder of the open source code monitoring service, SourceClear, Mark Curphey, Open Raven has a tool that monitors, maps, and manages how data moves through an organization.

In the cloud-based computing environments that have become standard operating practice during the work-from-home era created by the COVID-19 pandemic, data is moving to an increasingly vast number of points outside of a centralized network.

As Cole told dot.la when his company first emerged from stealth many security breaches are just instances where an org simply lost control of what data they had where, and it ended up on the internet. And people found it before they did."

Open Raven offers a free version of its service to map out networks and visualize where and how data moves. The core functionality will be available for free under an Apache 2.0 license, but there's a premium version of the product where the company will provide additional services for paying customers.

The transition to the cloud and out of physical data centers means that data stores change more quickly than ever before - leaving numerous unanswered questions," said Dave Cole, co-founder and CEO of Open Raven, in a statement. ec