With $3.3m funding round, Amplifier tackles the last mile security challenge with a self-healing approach that transforms how employees interact with corporate security tools, enhancing security without hindering productivity
ATLANTA, Ga. – Security teams rely on an ever-growing stack of security tools to keep their organization safe. Yet, coverage gaps and alerts across these tools do not get proper and timely attention because of the difficulty engaging company employees busy with their daily work to fix them. Today, Amplifier Security has launched from stealth with a $3.3m investment and the industry’s first AI-powered human-in-the-loop automation and security copilot that connects the dots between an organization’s existing security stack and their people.
The pre-seed funding round was led by Cota Capital with participation from WestWave Capital and Shift Left Ventures, and included angel investments from industry luminaries and founders of Slack, MobileIron, Centrify, PeopleNet, Skyflow and Mercury.
Enforcing security controls through automation gets pushback from users whose work is disrupted, for example, when a security patch update forces a system reboot during a critical workstream. Triaging security tool alerts means closing the loop with the end user to determine true versus false positives before taking disruptive actions – a truly burdensome process for everyone. Security teams do their best to navigate this complex situation — but it often leads to a strained relationship with the workforce. The Amplifier Security solution extends the value and effectiveness of existing security tools by empowering the entire company to work together towards a much faster response time that dramatically increases the security health and culture of an organization.
Amplifier provides an engagement layer between existing security tools and the workforce through Ampy – a trusted copilot that acts as an AI security buddy who helps employees understand the risk they are creating for the organization and solves their security issues while balancing their productivity. Building on the experiences people are used to, for example with credit card companies verifying suspicious transactions, Ampy engages with employees, guiding them through security protocols based on real-time insights. This approach not only speeds up response times but also significantly boosts an organization’s security posture by involving employees directly in the security process. Amplifier enhances the compliance of existing deployed tools like identity security, MFA, endpoint security, vulnerability scanning and management, SaaS and cloud security, SIEM and security training; and makes adaptive human protection a reality for organizations. The platform delivers the following capabilities and benefits:
- Security Data Fabric that creates a real-time security knowledge graph with data parsed and mapped across a company’s best of breed security stack. This creates a single source of truth for each employee across security tools which is otherwise hard to build and triangulate across multiple sources.
- Enforcement of 100% security tooling coverage across every employee and their endpoints through user-centric visualization of posture and usage in every security tool. The lack of tracking real-time tooling coverage causes anxiety for security teams as it only takes one tooling gap to turn into a breach.
- AI Security Buddy with personalized engagements that help employees triage alerts and self-heal security issues with context and actionable information. Omni-channel conversational engagements meet employees where they already work such as Slack, Chrome, Email or Teams.
- Security Hub that contextualizes and prioritizes security risks and vulnerabilities to help organizations translate the findings into actionable remediation engagements.
- Engagement Studio that transcends no-code workflows, where security teams can design and manage end-user engagements through intuitive generative AI prompts. This offloads countless hours of manual work to correlate data in spreadsheets, chasing down employees to triage alerts, getting users to maintain their security hygiene, and resolves security issues at record speed.
- Helps every CISO, their security teams, departmental leaders and individuals understand their security posture through intuitive personalized health scores and dashboards. Using natural language queries, they can research security findings across all their tools by severity, issue type, user role and activity to identify compounded risk for individuals.
Amplifier Security was founded by Shreyas Sadalgi, CEO and Thomas Donnelly, CTO and President, who both have two decades of experience in enterprise security, IT and automation. Donnelly is a three-time CISO and CIO with over a decade of experience leveraging human-centric approaches and technology that transformed security in organizations. He firmly believes that in today’s dynamic and decentralized workplaces, CISOs need to completely rethink how their teams operate by allowing users to self heal their own security issues. Rather than security operating in the background and interrupting employee productivity at inopportune times, Amplifier delivers an incredible user experience that drives everyone in the workforce to participate in their own security.
“There is a massive gap in the market that is preventing security practitioners from being successful. Most security tools aren’t built to engage users, as they’re always meant to work in the background.” said Shreyas Sadalgi, CEO and co-founder at Amplifier Security. “Amplifier flips the script by engaging employees on behalf of all security tools in a more human-friendly way, where every end-user interaction is a two-way conversation with the right tonality, context, empathy and actionable information based on the security finding and the user role. Our mission with Amplifier is to shift the cybersecurity focus to include both technology and the people who use it, creating a balanced and more secure environment for businesses.”
Amplifier has been engaged with security teams at over 15 companies as its marquee design partners; many who have been using its product in private betas and seeing daily value — hours saved every week toiling in spreadsheets, quick identification of tooling gaps in their environments, and the ability to self-heal common security issues.
“Most organizations haven’t significantly changed their approach to threat management – keeping the old silos between those responsible for security monitoring and those responding to the rest of the employee base.” said Steve Mancini, Head of Security at Guardant Health. “Security teams can no longer operate this way. Security has to be embedded in every function, and that means empowering all employees to participate in security. Even with all the security automations, our employees are the best sensors of the unusual or anomalous at every level of our business. They enable us to quickly get context when we notice suspicious behavior and identify incidents faster based on their proactive observations.”
Cal Henderson, co-founder of Slack added: “The way we operated our corporate security engineering program closely aligns with the design principles at the core of Amplifier Security’s vision. I’m a firm believer that engaging the workforce for security automation with a productivity platform like Slack is the only modern way to solve today’s dynamic cybersecurity threat landscape.”
Aditya Singh, Partner at Cota Capital commented: “Security is fundamentally about both people and technology, yet the industry has largely built security tools focused solely on the technology element. Everyone knows that when it comes to cybersecurity in workplaces, engaging humans is the biggest opportunity. Amplifier answers the bell with its unique human-in-the-loop solution. We believe they are uniquely positioned to turn this trend into a movement that forward-thinking CISOs will embrace so that they can more efficiently and effectively manage enterprise security.”
Gaurav Manglik, Partner at WestWave Capital said: “The lack of human engagement in security automation is a missed opportunity to educate people on the why behind the risk of each security finding. Because of today’s hybrid and dynamic workplaces where everyone is moving fast in the spirit of hyperproductivity, this problem has become harder to solve at scale. After assessing the market for many years, Amplifier has done the best execution we’ve seen from a product and team perspective thus far.”
Companies interested in amplifying their security can sign up here. The Amplifier team will also be on site at the 2024 RSA Conference in San Francisco to meet for a live demo.
