Israeli Cybersecurity Startup Sentra Raises $23M

Israeli cybersecurity startup Sentra, announced this week the completion of a $23 million seed round to help cloud-based businesses protect their critical and sensitive data, according to Calcalist. 

The round was led by Israeli-American investor Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and senior angel investors. 

Sentra’s security platform maps, classifies, and secures an organization’s sensitive data in real-time, which left exposed could significantly impact a company’s net income. 

Sentra was founded in July 2021 by Asaf Kochan, an outgoing commander of IDF Cyber Unit 8200, and Ron Reiter who co-founded and later sold cross-device mapping platform Crosswise to Israeli software and programming company Oracle for $50 million in 2016. 

Before Kochan and Reiter launched Sentra, the two reached out to roughly 200 companies to ascertain how much senior executives knew about their cloud information storage. 

“Most of the companies put all the data on the cloud but don’t actually know where it is being stored,” Kochan told Calcalist. “The second question I asked was do they know where their sensitive data is stored, as in encrypted data, personal information, and financial information. Most don’t really know where it is, and it is very difficult to protect information if you don’t know its location. The third question I asked them was how much does it pain them that they don’t know where their data is stored, and it became clear that this is a real pain point for organizations, but most of them have gotten used to a situation in which they don’t know everything about their data.”