Sym announced it raised $9 million in a Series A funding round led by Amplify Partners, rapidly following a $3M Seed round lead by Andy McLoughlin of Uncork Capital and Robin Vasan of Mango Capital.
Angel investors Gerhard Eschelbeck, former CISO of Google, Sri Viswanath, CTO of Atlassian, and Jason Warner, CTO of GitHub also participated. The company will use the funds to expand its engineering team and scale its sales and marketing operations.
Sym’s platform addresses a critical security gap for fast-moving engineering teams by delivering a security workflow platform that enables developers to incorporate security, privacy, and governance controls into their software development workspace and process.
The platform contains dozens of pre-built templates that both translate common security policies into code and pre-integrate into common developer technology stacks such as identity systems like Okta, and messaging systems like Slack, plus a framework for customizing them in a way that minimizes engineering effort.
As a result, engineering teams demonstrate security effectiveness and accountability to their information security counterparts, all without breaking stride on the pace of development.
Security within the engineering process has become more problematic in recent years as a rise in the number of cyberthreats has put increasing pressure on engineering teams to shore up the security within their software access, creation, and deployment processes.
This effort is often at odds with competing pressure to create and release software quickly to meet market and competitive demands. One area in which this collision of priorities has taken a toll is that of secure access.
According to the Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report, more than 80% of breaches involved the hacking of access credentials. To be even more specific, the cyberattackers in July’s Twitter hack targeted engineers’ administrative tools to gain access to high-profile accounts.
By instituting more rigor around access request, permission, removal, and audit, teams can eliminate this kind of threat. Sym has targeted its platform to access and many other critical security workflows, including handling sensitive data, modifying critical infrastructure, and incorporating compliance gates into the software release process.
“We’re excited to partner with Sunil and Amplify on this mission,” said Yasyf Mohamedali, CEO of Sym.
“Engineering teams today are stuck choosing between security and speed. Our mission at Sym is to empower them to deliver perfect security and compliance workflows while maintaining their current rapid pace of development. We’re setting out to fundamentally change how companies implement and demonstrate their security posture.”
“The tension between rapid software delivery and managing cyberthreats is widening the gap between information security and engineering teams,” said Sunil Dhaliwal, General Partner at Amplify Partners.
“We backed Sym because they empower both development and infosec teams to bridge that divide. They have assembled an impressive team, innovated at a record pace, and gained the trust of a growing customer base. Amplify is fully aligned with Sym’s vision of the future and incredibly optimistic about their next phase of growth.”
