Laminar raised an additional $30m, nearly doubling its funding to $67m

By Joy Dumasia

Laminar, a public cloud data security provider, announced that it had raised an additional $30 million, nearly doubling its funding to $67 million in less than six months on the significant demand for its solutions. The additional funding, with participation from Tiger Global Management and Salesforce Ventures, follows seed and initial Series A investments of $37 million in November 2021. The funding comes at a pivotal time for Laminar as it continues its first-to-market product rollout with the announcement of three new capabilities within the Laminar Cloud Data Security Platform, giving the company a significant lead in the public cloud data security startup race.

Laminar has seen significant demand from CISOs and their security teams for its cloud data security solutions, which is driving investor excitement. Including Laminar’s $67 million of venture capital, the various cloud data security startups have raised a combined more than $200 million in funding, validating the industry’s need for visibility into and security of public cloud data.

“The growing number of players in our space is exciting as it drives us to further innovate with both speed and quality. A rising tide lifts all boats. Hence, the more cybersecurity and cloud leaders learn that there are products out there that solve their greatest public cloud data challenges, the more we all win,” said Amit Shaked, CEO and Co-Founder, Laminar.

The latest round will fund even faster product innovation, grow sales, and market marketing to capture its global team’s market demand and build-out. Laminar’s new investors bring unique expertise to aid the company on its industry-disrupting journey. Tiger Global Management has an impressive track record of spotting the next big names in cybersecurity, including SentinelOne, Snyk and Lacework. Salesforce Ventures is a major cloud data and cybersecurity investor with a mission to bring trust to the cloud industry with strategic investments in companies like Wiz, Databricks and Snowflake.

Nowi Kallen, managing director at Salesforce Ventures, said: “Laminar is rapidly innovating to provide effective solutions for data security posture management and cloud DLP. We are thrilled to support the team on its mission to make the public cloud a significantly safer place for organizations’ data and are highly impressed with their pace of execution.”

Laminar continues to innovate quickly for customers by adding three new capabilities within the Laminar Cloud Data Security Platform – as well as the successful completion of its SOC 2 Type II certification, which ensures compliance with the leading industry standards for managing data, privacy, and security. New capabilities include:

• Added support for Microsoft Azure: Laminar is truly multi-cloud by adding Microsoft Azure support to its existing support for Amazon AWS. Cross cloud consistency is important as its State of Public Cloud Data Security Report found 56% of organizations work with two or more cloud providers.
• A full suite of data-centric security policies: Laminar has introduced a full suite of data-centric policies that are automatically enforced. These data-centric policies are geared towards preventing the breach or leakage of sensitive data, regardless of the cloud infrastructure that stores it.
• The ability to discover and classify data in self-hosted, embedded databases: “Shadow data” encompasses data that is not tracked by IT yet might contain sensitive information. This category includes databases that are embedded into cloud compute instances (AWS EC2s or Azure VMs). Laminar is now the first to support autonomous discovery of these data assets wherever they are located without needing knowledge of their access credentials or location. This includes the asynchronous mapping and classification of the data that is stored in those assets.

“Companies need a unified view of their sensitive data in the cloud and a solution that continuously monitors and alerts. This enables data security to drive a ‘Discover, Control & Verify’ approach with application development and data science teams, which allows them to safely move at the speed of the cloud. Laminar delivers on all of these elements, and these latest enhancements will only improve the customer experience,” said Yaniv Toledano, global CISO at FinTech provider Pagaya.

Oran Avraham, CTO and co-founder of Laminar, concluded: “Using our red team and in-house cloud security experience, as well as consistent inputs from our prospects and customers, we are continuously enhancing our products at a rate unmatched in the market. We are excited to see what the future holds following these action-packed six months on the market.”