Cloud security platform Akeero raises $1.2m in pre-seed funding

Irish cloud security platform Akeero has raised $1.2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Dublin-based venture capital firm Frontline Ventures.

Other participants include Trusight Ventures, Tiny VC, Capitoria and Irish tech veteran Bill McCabe's Oyster Capital Investments.

Akeero said it intends to use the financing to accelerate product development and market penetration and to take on more engineering and operations staff.

Founded in 2020 by Ciarán O'Keeffe, Anthi Gilligan and Stuart Cameron, Akeero claims to be the first automated security design platform designed especially for cloud-native environments. Built by experienced security architects, and integrated with existing automation and DevOps toolsets, it helps teams to collaboratively build secure apps and networks before a line of code is written. The result is that organisations should end up spending less time fixing security issues and more on focusing on ensuring their solutions are as good as they can be.

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The company’s platform isn’t currently widely available but it is being used in beta mode by a number of early adopters, including a well-known multinational consumer electronics company.

The platform is intended to reduce threat identification time by 90 per cent.

“Akeero basically allows organisations to automate the identification of security requirements for their cloud-based infrastructure architectures. Previously, a lot of organisations would skip this step in terms of their design work for a product or service and skip straight into coding, but this can create huge problems from a security perspective,” said Mr O’Keeffe, the company’s chief executive. He said Akeero is currently weighing plans to seek further funding before the end of the summer.

Launch

“We’re pretty much ready to go in terms of a commercial launch and have been using this time to iron out any bugs before the platform goes out as a full release,” Mr O’Keeffe added.

Frontline Ventures is a Dublin and London-based VC that has backed a large number of Irish tech companies, including Manna, Brightflag, Workvivo, Qualio, Drop, Payslip and Pointy, which was bought by Google in a deal valued at $160 million early last year.

"As cloud infrastructure becomes more complex, the world of threats that companies are exposed to is growing exponentially. There simply aren't enough security architects in the world today to meet demand, said Finn Murphy, a partner at the VC.

“Akeero will give every engineering team the ability to understand the threats they’re exposing themselves to and mitigate those threats through smart infrastructure design and monitoring,” he added.