As cyber intrusion insurance premiums double year over year and AI-driven cyberattacks cost U.S. companies an average of $9.48 million per breach, the importance of robust cloud security has never been more crucial. Averlon, a pioneering cloud security company, has emerged from stealth mode with an $8 million seed funding round to transform how organizations stay ahead of these emerging threats. This latest investment, which brings the company’s total funding to $10.5 million, is led by Voyager Capital with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Outpost Ventures, along with several prominent CISOs and industry leaders.
“As cyberattacks grow more sophisticated, it’s critical for companies to anticipate where and how attackers will strike,” said Sunil Gottumukkala, CEO and Co-Founder of Averlon, who was formerly the SVP of Cybersecurity at Salesforce. “And yet, the reality is most CISOs don’t feel prepared for today’s threats. Security teams are bombarded with daily alerts, often leading to a reactive security posture where they are playing catch-up or unsure where to focus. Averlon solves this challenge, providing customers with a holistic way to understand, predict, and prevent cloud security attacks.”
Why Averlon?
The scale and speed of AI-driven attacks have surpassed traditional defenses. CISOs and their teams need to adopt an attacker’s mindset to anticipate how cloud assets may be breached, a challenging task with outdated tools. Large enterprises, on average, receive over 15,000 alerts monthly, equating to around 93 alerts per working hour, making it nearly impossible to assess and prioritize risks effectively.
In contrast to traditional tools that overwhelm teams with reactive alerts and overlook the true root cause, Averlon’s AI-powered platform identifies specific cloud security issues that can lead to real-world attacks. Customers can seamlessly integrate their cloud environment and, within minutes, gain a clear understanding of their security risks and where to focus their attention.
“With the rise of AI, attacks are becoming more sophisticated,” said Rinki Sethi, CISO of BILL. “To stay ahead and successfully safeguard their organization, CISOs and their teams must learn how to think like attackers and anticipate how they breach cloud assets. Averlon solves this challenge, providing customers with a holistic way to understand, predict, and prevent cloud security attacks.”
Turning the Tables on Attackers
Averlon utilizes AI technology to power cyberattacks and defend against them. It offers comprehensive visibility into all cloud assets, including network access, connectivity, software, and policies. It continuously analyzes vulnerabilities to anticipate and thwart attacks. This proactive approach enables teams to identify larger threats and address them with precise solutions.
“Averlon is a platform built to give CISOs and security teams peace of mind,” said Vishal Agarwal, CTO and Co-Founder of Averlon, who was formerly SVP of Security Engineering with Salesforce. “Our AI model provides panoptic visibility, comprehensive attack chain analysis and rapid remediation, all seamlessly integrated.”
Cloud security threats continue to increase with AI
According to Forrester Research, nearly 78% of security professionals estimate their organization’s data was breached or compromised in the past year. With the introduction of more SaaS and AI-based applications, the risk continues to increase.
“We needed a security solution that could deliver better visibility, predictive insights and prevention of cloud security attacks, while also working seamlessly within our cloud workloads,” said Scott Roberts, CISO of UiPath. “Averlon meets this need while also saving our team critical time in our zero-day incident response and remediation.”
“The fundamental job of a CISO is risk management. If you live in this world, you have a huge pile of risk and your job is to identify the most effective things you can do, in the shortest period of time, to reduce risk,” said Austin Guyette, Partner at Voyager Capital. “Averlon is a powerful platform that allows enterprises to map exactly how an attacker can compromise an environment. By understanding the attacker’s view, Averlon gives CISOs and their teams unparalleled ability to prioritize what an attacker can explore or exploit to pinpoint threats, predict attacks, and to mitigate them.”
Customers can utilize Averlon’s attack chain analysis to narrow the scope of the investigation and simplify the process of determining the impact. This allows security teams to act swiftly to contain, eradicate, and recover from incidents.