Banyan Security
Alter Blog • January 18, 2022
Alter Venture Partners is excited to be part of Banyan Security’s Series B funding, which positions this leading Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) provider to accelerate its go-to-market efforts and deepen its already extensive product feature set. We are excited to be partnering with our co-investors in this round, Third Point Ventures and Susquehanna Venture Capital, as well as with existing investors Shasta Ventures and Unusual Ventures on this journey.
Consumers are probably most familiar with virtual private networks (VPNs) in relation to mitigating online privacy and cybersecurity concerns. Road warriors of large enterprises have been using VPNs for years in order to access corporate email, CRM tools and other business critical applications (sometimes even gritting their teeth in frustration at the network performance!) The current pandemic has thrown a curve ball at the VPN industry and laid bare the shortcomings of the technology. VPNs were not designed for an entire enterprise’s workforce simultaneously accessing all corporate applications remotely. With VPNs all network access traffic (including your favorite video conferencing service) is funneled through one concentrator chokepoint resulting in a degraded service for all. Furthermore, VPN users authenticate only once at the session initiation and then can roam freely across the corporate network without being subjected to fine-grained access controls and sophisticated policy enforcement. Given our expertise in networking technologies from our tenure working at some of the largest global communications providers, we at Alter, having tracked the evolution of VPNs for years, were particularly impressed by Banyan Security’s elegant cloud-based ZTNA solution and how that solved the requirements of our new “work from anywhere” environment. The pandemic has shattered the rigid boundaries of the enterprise so that now workers can access data and applications from any device at any location and any time. Not surprisingly, IT professionals are adopting a “zero trust” approach to securing access to corporate networks.
We would like to highlight the most compelling reasons for Alter’s investment decision:
Customer Traction: Banyan Security’s ZTNA solution, Zero Trust Remote Access, has been embraced and adopted by large Fortune 500 multinational companies with highly distributed workforces and numerous offices globally. The endorsement of these customers with rigorous vendor evaluation processes speaks volumes about the solution’s scalability, real-time security assessment capabilities, granular zero trust policy controls, and ease of deployment. To complement this installed base of large corporations, Banyan Security’s new Team Edition will help power its product-led growth initiative to attract customers from other market segments to try its powerful Zero Trust Remote Access product at no cost.
Product: The patented zero trust architecture of Banyan Security’s solution enables transparent and continuous enforcement of fine-grained access control policies to corporate applications, services and infrastructure for any user and device across on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, and SaaS environments. In a further demonstration of the solution’s flexibility, by utilizing Banyan Security’s extensible pre-built integrations and framework, enterprise customers are able to maintain usage of their existing tools for authenticating and securing their users thereby smoothing implementation. Trust Scores, based on a variety of Banyan Security and third party inputs, quantify the security posture of all endpoints and are an integral part of the zero trust architecture.
Team: Banyan Security’s co-founders, Jayanth Gummaraju, Tarun Desikan, and Yoshio Turner, were uniquely suited to conceive of the idea for this company given their backgrounds in cybersecurity and enterprise networking. In conjunction with this financing round, the company has been fortunate to attract additional executives in cybersecurity and for its go-to-market initiatives. With this financing Banyan Security will also be able to supplement its talented engineering staff to enhance the ZTNA solution’s industry-leading features.
For more details on Banyan Security’s financing and future plans, please visit Jayanth Gummaraju’s blog post.
