Israeli-Founded Cybersecurity Startup Axis Security Raises $32M

Israeli-founded cybersecurity startup Axis Security, which emerged from stealth mode earlier this year, announced on Tuesday that they have raised a $32 million Series B funding round.

The round was led by Canaan Partners, with participation from existing investors Ten Eleven Ventures and Cyberstarts, a VC firm backed by founders and entrepreneurs from Sequoia Capital, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, and Imperva, among others.

Founded in 2019 by Dor Knafo and Gil Azrielant, Axis Security launched its purpose-built, cloud-native security and analytics platform to offer organizations control of private application access. The platform allows users to connect on any device in minutes to private apps without going through the network or the applications.

Axis has raised a total of $49 million, including a $17 million funding round in March. Ten Eleven Ventures led the Series A, while Cyberstarts led the seed round, both announced that month.

Axis will use the funds to accelerate growth and meet market demand driven largely by COVID-19 and the work from anywhere (WFA) movement sweeping the globe, a statement from the company said.

As part of the funding round, Canaan Partners general partner Joydeep Bhattacharyya has joined Axis Security’s board of directors.

“Axis has quickly established itself with a differentiated, already proven approach to the decades-old problem of securing application access,” said Bhattacharyya, “What has been most impressive to us is how the company has moved quickly and met the opportunity since coming out of stealth in March. It is a testament to the team and the power of the Axis platform. The company is rising at the right moment and we are humbled to become their partner at such a pivotal time.”

The new funding will drive the company’s continued development of its Zero Trust platform and expansion outside of North America, while enabling further investment in go-to-market resources, including an expanded channel program and team.

Alongside the funding round, the company also announced enhancements to its Axis Application Access Cloud, as well as integrations with leading security providers CrowdStrike, Splunk and Okta. The Axis Security App Access Cloud solves the issue of implicitly open network access with a modern approach. and alleviates the pain points of network-based security associated with VPNs which can be complex, agent-based, slow to deploy and hard to manage, especially when providing access to third-party supply chain partners, vendors, contractors and remote employees at scale.

“Our approach is a proven game-changer for customers,” said Dor Knafo, co-founder and CEO of Axis Security. “We’re solving one of the most complex security challenges IT faces right now in rapidly onboarding remote workers and third parties simply and securely. Doing this at scale is proving to be far more difficult than many organizations expected. We’re giving IT teams a single, managed solution for access, security, control and scalability without the complexity and end-user headaches of what’s available today.”

“Axis has quickly accelerated its growth with an innovative, cloud-centric approach that reduces the management burden associated with traditional VPN architectures. This technology is a win-win for both IT and end users, easily and rapidly enabling many more kinds of secure access use cases,” said Alex Doll, founder and managing general partner of Ten Eleven Ventures.