SPARK Ventures invests in $16 million series B funding of Secerno led by Amadeus
Spark Ventures announced that it has invested in a $16 million second round financing of Secerno Limited led by Amdeus Capital Partners. Eden Ventures, who along with Spark Ventures were previous investors in the company, have also participated in this round.
Secerno, an Oxford (UK) based company supplying software and appliances that provide the highest level of protection against internal and external threats to databases. Secerno will use this funding for further development of its award-winning database activity monitoring and security platform and to accelerate the growth of its sales channels, principally in the US and EMEA.
The investors believe that Secerno’s patent-pending SynoptiQ technology, which uses advanced mathematical techniques to understand database instructions at an unprecedented and hitherto unmatched level of sophistication, leapfrogs current solutions in the database security market. Secerno enables companies, organisations and government bodies to audit and protect data held by them more effectively than at present.
Secerno’s underlying SynoptiQ technology was developed by founder and CTO, Dr Steve Moyle, in the Computing Laboratory at Oxford University. In May this year, the company launched Secerno.SQL 3.0, which provides the fastest-to-set-up and most comprehensive database protection available. Secerno is led by CEO, Steve Hurn, formerly Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing at OSS company Cramer Systems (acquired by Amdocs in 2006), where he grew sales from start up to $100m turnover.
Commenting on Secerno’s potential, Amadeus Partner, Richard Anton, who joins the company’s Board, says: “Secerno’s team combines impressive R&D with proven sales expertise. In its short history the company has achieved an impressive number of sales channels and alliances, in addition to a roster of blue chip companies and organisations that are now deploying Secerno.SQL, with positive feedback.
Secerno is bringing ground breaking technology to market just as issues of customer privacy, compliance and litigation move to the top of the agenda for CIOs.”
Steve Hurn, CEO of Secerno says; “We are honoured to receive this round of funding from such an esteemed group of investors known for successes in the technology industry. With this investment, Secerno will be even better placed to meet the accelerating market demand for intricate, intelligent database activity monitoring and 100% accurate blocking of threats and we will be bringing our unique platform to new markets and channels globally.”
SPARK’s investment came from several funds managed by SPARK Venture Management Limited, namely SPARK VCT plc, SPARK VCT3 plc and The Isis College Fund.
For further information please call Kiko Duffy, SPARK Ventures plc, +44 (0)20 7851 7707
NOTES TO EDITORS
About Secerno (www.secerno.com)
Secerno provides the world’s most advanced, comprehensive and intelligent activity monitoring and database security solution. The company offers the highest levels of protection against internal and external threats, optimises compliance auditing and delivers the ability to improve the security of applications. Its proprietary machine-learning technology automatically fingerprints the true intent of all database interactions, enabling organisations to see and prove with unprecedented granular analysis exactly how their databases are accessed.
At the core of all products is Secerno’s SynoptiQ technology, based on breakthrough research into efficient grammatical clustering. SynoptiQ analyses all database traffic using the application level - Level 7 - of the OSI stack to automatically fingerprint the true intent of all database requests. This enables organisations to see and prove with unprecedented granular analysis exactly how their data is accessed and changed. SynoptiQ automatically clusters database interactions with others of similar intent; highlighting areas of concern such as authenticated users abusing their privileges, attackers masquerading as authenticated users or any other form of SQL injection attack.
Uniquely, Secerno enforces a positive security policy of only approved behaviour, providing the option to either log, monitor, block or substitute database requests, all the while delivering zero false positives and eliminating the need for resource-intensive allow and block lists or externally-produced signatures.
Secerno offers protection to customers across industries including financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, retail, and government agencies and departments. The company is funded by UK investors Amadeus, Eden Ventures and SPARK Ventures