Grip Security grasps $19m Series A following a whirlwind debut year

December 8, 2021

SaaS security startup Grip Security has raised $19m from a Series A financing round led by Intel Capital.

Grip has had a powerful first year of existence, raising $6m back in April alongside its recent Series A, bringing the total raised for 2021 to $25m. The Series A was also supported by existing investor YL Ventures, who backed Grip in its seed round.

Founded in February this year, Grip provides security teams with comprehensive visibility and control over every SaaS in use by the organisation, including shadow applications, without causing performance degradation or interference.

Grip was devised to be quicker and smarter than malicious actors that are now ubiquitous in the SaaS environment and provide customers with rapidly deployed solutions for access management and data governance.

The company claims it intends to use the new capital to triple its headcount in 2022 and expand from 25 employees to more than 75, speed up product development and expand its go-to-market in the US.

Grip Security CEO and co-founder Lior Yaari said, “SaaS is self-service, with the barrier of adoption being only a signup form. This leaves CISOs in a frustrating position. With existing inadequate solutions, CISOs must place barriers to SaaS adoption or prohibit it entirely in order to secure their organisation, impeding innovation. We believe a self-service problem requires a self-governing solution.”

Intel Capital managing director Sunil Kurkure added, “Grip has identified what SaaS security teams were lacking and has provided them with a viable, accessible and impactful solution. With existing products taking months to deploy and interfering with innovation and scale, Grip’s quick and easy deployment process has the potential to change the way SaaS security interacts with business workflows.”

Lionbridge chief trust officer Doug Graham also commented, “As an organisation, we increasingly use SaaS-based applications to be flexible, agile and operate at digital speed, but no other security solutions allowed us to retain that flexibility while also protecting our environment and data. With Grip, one can gain rapid visibility into the organisation’s SaaS portfolio and provide an intuitive way to enhance governance and control, without slowing the speed of our business partners.”