Banyan Security Receives $17M

Banyan Security, a leading provider of cloud-centric secure remote access solutions based on Zero Trust security principles, today announced it has closed $17 million in funding led by Shasta Ventures, with participation from Unusual Ventures.

Virtually every enterprise today uses traditional perimeter security tools such as VPNs to protect access to internal resources. However, with 40 percent of the workforce being mobile today and 75 percent of enterprises either in hybrid or multi-cloud environments, the key assumptions enterprise security team have held such as tying users to physical locations, only granting access to managed devices, giving the same access privileges for all user types, and assuming that the internal network is a safe place to deploy corporate applications have started to break down. As the perimeter security model fails, enterprise data breaches continue to occur on a daily basis.

"Secure remote access is fundamentally broken for today's mobile workforce and cloud environments,'' said Jayanth Gummaraju, Co-Founder and CEO of Banyan Security. "At Banyan, we've completely reimagined remote access by building a comprehensive zero trust remote access platform from the ground up to address these hard problems. This investment is a testament to our unique offering and will be used to scale our go-to-market efforts and further enhance our product with deep enterprise integrations and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms."

Experts predict that zero trust will become one of the largest frameworks in cybersecurity by 2021. Traditional security perimeters have become more blurred and less relevant as businesses store data in both on-premises data centers and multi-cloud environments. Old security tactics no longer work, and some of the most damaging breaches have resulted from threat actors gaining access to corporate networks and moving laterally with ease. It's crucial for businesses to know who has access to their networks and what actions they can perform once inside.

"Banyan's decentralized approach to zero trust remote access is a unique and promising solution," said Nitin Chopra, partner at Shasta Ventures. "Especially as businesses recognize that traditional approaches like VPNs no longer work in our 'always-on' ecosystem. The company has already established itself as a leader in a $10 billion market, and promises to make a positive, long-term impact on an incredibly pressing problem for businesses."

Inspired by Google's architectural principles for a zero trust security framework, BeyondCorp, Banyan's technology is designed to displace legacy VPNs via least-privileged access, continuous verification and fine-grained authorization policies. The solution integrates with existing security tools and creates a trust score that allows differentiated policy enforcement. Instead of granting access to the entire corporate network based on one-time user authentication, Banyan enables continuous authorization and encrypted access to specific corporate applications and resources based on user and device security posture in real-time, and also the sensitivity of the applications/data that are being accessed.

In the past year, Banyan has tripled the size of its team, delivered an enterprise grade product, established a recurring revenue model, and significantly grown its customer base to include SAP, BlueVoyant and several Fortune 500 companies.

"Banyan has enabled us to deliver a zero trust access solution across our entire employee base," said Sadiq Khan, Chief Information Security Officer at BlueVoyant. "With Banyan, we offer secure, streamlined access to all corporate resources for our service operations center, developers, executives and administrative staff, while still leveraging our existing investments in single sign-on, mobile device management and endpoint detection and response tools. Banyan's commitment to customer success and world-class engineers has made our zero trust journey easier to navigate."

"We are huge believers in the founders at Banyan," said John Vrionis, Banyan board member and partner at Unusual Ventures. "We've experienced their incredible work firsthand over the past year and are excited about the game changing enterprise software company they are building."

About Shasta Ventures

Shasta Ventures is a leading early-stage venture capital firm partnering with bold, creative entrepreneurs who are passionate about building epic products and amazing experiences. Founded in 2004, Shasta Ventures has more than $1 billion under management investing in enterprise and consumer companies with a deep focus on emerging platforms. For more information go to https://shastaventures.com.

About Unusual Ventures

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinctive advantage to both consumer and enterprise entrepreneurs. Unusual is rethinking the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with programmatic and hands-on services, such as Unusual Academy and the Get Ahead Platform, and by engaging with a number of HBCUs and other community-based organizations, including non-profits and children's hospitals, as their limited partner base. Described as a partner versus a top down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser focused on serving exceptional founders, world-class teams, and innovative products. For more information, visit: www.unusual.vc

About Banyan Security

Banyan Security's next-generation Zero Trust Remote Access platform provides seamless remote access to corporate resources hosted in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Banyan enhances security by reducing your attack surface, eliminating lateral movement, and preventing unauthorized access. Utilizing innovative TrustScoring powered by machine learning, Banyan ensures both users and devices are authenticated and authorized before granting granular least privilege access to sensitive corporate applications and servers. Banyan's highly scalable platform is currently used by enterprises across verticals including healthcare, manufacturing, and technology. To learn more, visit www.banyansecurity.io.