CloudPassage, the developer of cloud server security software, has raised $14 million in Series B financing led by Tenaya Capital with Benchmark Capital and Musea Ventures participating in the round. This brings CloudPassage’s total funding to $20.5 million.
CloudPassage offers a server security and compliance product specifically built for elastic, dynamic cloud environments. While companies are able to deploy security firewalls around content stored in data centers, as companies move to the cloud for servers, they face a security challenge of securing a dynamic, scalable environment.
What makes CloudPassage’s offering unique is that it provides security in cloud hosting environments where consistent physical location, network control and perimeter security are not guaranteed. And the company says it can be deployed in minutes.
The startup’s Halo architecture automates multiple server security functions and allows companies to deploy security in public cloud environments. Halo combines an ultra-lightweight guest VM software component with an elastic compute grid optimized for security operations.
As CEO and co-founder Carson Sweet explains to us, the company is steadily growing, with the launch of its commercial product and a 70 percent growth in client uptake for the first two months of 2012, compared with last year (clients include companies like Foursquare). In particular, Sweet says CloudPassage as seen an uptake in clients using Windows looking to adopt the cloud.
Benchmark partner Kevin Harvey said of the investment: “We invested in CloudPassage because we believe Security is one the biggest issues in cloud adoption and CloudPassage has the leading solution to the problem.”
The new funding will be used to expand market penetration of Halo.