CloudPassage Raises $25.5 Million for Cloud Security

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The market for cloud security is a hot one with multiple vendors all jockeying for both market and mind share. To gain share, typically requires money and lots of it.

Today cloud security and compliance vendor CloudPassage announced that it has completed a Series C round of funding with $25.5 million pouring into the company. The company has raised a total of $53 million since it was started in 2010. CloudPassage’s primary product platform is a technology called Halo, which is an automated platform for the delivery of security and control across public and private clouds.

In terms of why CloudPassage is now raising new money, it all has to with fueling expansion and growth.

“A winning venture financing strategy ties financing rounds to specific goals for the proceeds that prepare the company for the next phase of development and growth,” Sweet told Datamation. “The size of a round needs to be planned around capital required to execute against those specific goals, and should allow for working capital to spare.”

Sweet explained that the previous funding rounds’ goals were met with working capital to spare, as planned. This new round was raised because the company is ready to move to into an expansion and growth phase, and the $25 million target was based on planning the investments needed to meet CloudPassage’s expansion and growth objectives.

“The next phase of development is about building out world-class marketing and sales organizations and executing a go-to-market strategy that dramatically extends our position as a leader in the cloud security space,” Sweet said.

What that means is that the company will need to make heavy investments in marketing and sales personnel and activities. Sweet added that the earlier financing rounds focused on capitalizing efforts associated with technology innovation and development. The earlier rounds also helped the company to establish its productization efforts and refinement of the technology, including test marketing, and establishment of robust product-market fit.

One of the key areas of security that the CloudPassage solution helps in is that of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliance. The CloudPassage Halo solution is able to automate 75 percent of the technical infrastructure controls for PCI-DSS. According to a recent study from Verizon, PCI compliance is still a struggle for the majority of organizations.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.