April 30, 2024 | Business Wire | San Jose, CA

Elisity, the pioneer in identity-based microsegmentation, today announced it has raised $37 million in Series B funding from global software investor Insight Partners. Elisity will use the new funds to extend its platform’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, fully leveraging organizations’ device identity data to anticipate and pre-empt emerging cyber threats and establish unprecedented control over IT, OT, IoT and hybrid environments.

Microsegmentation is essential to containing attackers’ lateral movement within compromised networks, making it fundamental to cyber defense and foundational to building zero trust architectures. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 60% of enterprises working toward zero trust architecture will use more than one deployment form of microsegmentation, which is up from less than 5% in 2023. Unsurprisingly, Exactitude Consultancy predicts the global microsegmentation market will grow from $2.63 billion in 2023 to $12.47 billion by 2030.

“Elisity is addressing a critical segmentation need within our customers’ infrastructure, but our identity-based approach and continued AI investments will ensure we can leverage our ‘single source of truth’ on network assets to redefine network security with more real-time, adaptable security policies,” said James Winebrenner, CEO of Elisity. “Traditional segmentation efforts often pitted performance and availability focused networking teams against security teams inserting control choke points. By abstracting segmentation from network operations, Elisity removes traditional project friction, costs and delays, allowing zero trust projects to quickly proceed and enabling new network security capabilities as needs evolve tomorrow.”

Elisity’s identity-based approach to microsegmentation represents a major market shift by centralizing the security policy management process within Elisity IndentityGraph. This allows networking teams to gain unprecedented visibility and focus on enhancing performance and availability while security teams assert more granular control over users, devices and workloads based on their contextual attributes. In this way, Elisity addresses the long-time challenge of easily and quickly deploying microsegmentation and streamlines efforts to deploy zero trust and other critical capabilities.

“As a former CISO, I had completely dismissed microsegmentation until I talked to Elisity’s customers,” said Stephen Ward, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “More than a decade as a former operator taught me that these projects are notoriously difficult due to a lack of viable, scalable technical approaches to implementing essential controls exactly where and how they're needed. Due diligence and conversations with customers convinced me that Elisity could be quickly and effectively implemented and scaled to address a fast-growing need across thousands of IT and OT environments.”

Healthcare Market Opportunity

Recent attacks on the U.S. healthcare sector by ransomware group ALPHV-Blackcat and others have utilized the tactic of compromising networks and then moving laterally within them to attack more valuable assets. Elisity’s ability to abstract policy management from networks allows healthcare and other organizations to easily implement granular controls in hybrid environments merging information technology (IT) and internet of things (IoT) assets.

Elisity has successfully partnered with healthcare organizations facing not only cyber threats, but also regulatory requirements demanding tight controls over patient data and access to life-supporting medical devices.

“Elisity’s identity-based microsegmentation brings tremendous capabilities to our security stack as a critical control point for containing ransomware, blocking malicious lateral network traffic and minimizing incident blast radius,” Aaron Weismann, CISO at Main Line Health. “The platform has already proven valuable in technical network representations for meeting cyber insurance and compliance requirements. Elisity features prominently for our present and forward-looking security posture, allowing us to easily adjust to new regulatory as well as threat landscape developments.”

Critical Infrastructure Market Opportunity

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommends critical infrastructure providers implement network segmentation as a key step in their cyber resilience strategies. Elisity's agentless, identity-based platform also provides tremendous advantages to the OT environments of industrial control systems (ICS) powering critical infrastructure. Identity-based controls are particularly critical in these environments given a wide range of devices are legacy systems that cannot be protected with agent-based endpoint security solutions common in IT environments.

Elisity supports a number of critical infrastructure providers’ efforts to protect OT systems lacking security features, prevent expensive operational disruptions, address compliance requirements, manage supply chain risks, converge IT-OT networks, and facilitate cyber incident response.

“Elisity has surpassed all our expectations,” said Max Everett, CISO at Shaw Industries and former White House CIO. “We deployed it at two of our sites in less than an hour, and by the next day, we were confidently implementing policies. This unprecedented speed and effectiveness soon made Elisity an indispensable part of our network security strategy across our manufacturing sites, protecting thousands of managed IT assets as well as our growing number of unmanaged IoT and OT assets.”

Insight Partners joins AllegisCyber Capital and Two Bear Capital—who co-led the Series A and participated in the Series B—along with seed investor Atlantic Bridge, to take Elisity’s total funding to more than $72 million.

About Elisity

Elisity revolutionizes network security, implementing dynamic, context-aware policies that adapt to modern cyber threats, offering a fresh take on safeguarding network resources.

About Insight Partners

Insight Partners is a global software investor partnering with high-growth technology, software, and Internet startup and ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. As of December 31, 2023, the firm has over $80B in regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested in more than 800 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio companies achieve an IPO. Headquartered in New York City, Insight has offices in London, Tel Aviv, and the Bay Area. Insight’s mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with tailored, hands-on software expertise along their growth journey, from their first investment to IPO. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on X @insightpartners.

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