Redmond Cloud Security Company Averlon Exits Stealth Mode with $8M Seed Round | News

Averlon, a cloud security company based in Redmond, has emerged from stealth mode with an $8 million seed funding round aimed at helping organizations stay ahead of emerging cyberattack threats.

Averlon’s latest investment is led by Voyager Capital with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Outpost Ventures, along with several prominent chief information security officers, or CISOs, and industry leaders, according to a company news release. The seed round brings Averlon’s total funding to $10.5 million.

“As cyberattacks grow more sophisticated, it’s critical for companies to anticipate where and how attackers will strike,” Sunil Gottumukkala, CEO and co-founder of Averlon, said in the release. “And yet, the reality is most CISOs don’t feel prepared for today’s threats. Security teams are bombarded with daily alerts, often leading to a reactive security posture where they are playing catch-up or unsure where to focus. Averlon solves for this challenge, providing customers with a holistic way to understand, predict, and prevent cloud security attacks.”

Gottumukkala co-founded Averlon in August 2022 with Vishal Agarwal, chief technology officer. Averlon now has 12 employees with plans to double that by early 2025, according to a company representative. Gottumukkala and Agarwal formerly worked at Salesforce in Bellevue, as senior vice president of cybersecurity and SVP of security engineering, respectively. They each worked at Microsoft for 16 years before that.

Averlon’s technology provides panoptic visibility of all cloud assets — from network access and connectivity to software and policies — while continuously analyzing vulnerabilities to predict and neutralize attack chains, the company said of what it called a proactive approach that allows companies to see bigger-picture threats and eliminate them with surgical fixes. Using Averlon’s proprietary AI, customers can seamlessly onboard their cloud environment and quickly see their security risks and where to direct their attention, the release said.

“Averlon is a platform built to give CISOs and security teams peace of mind,” Agarwal said in the release. “Our AI model provides panoptic visibility, comprehensive attack chain analysis and rapid remediation, all seamlessly integrated.”

Austin Guyette, partner at Voyager Capital, said a CISO’s fundamental job is risk management.

“If you live in this world, you have a huge pile of risk and your job is to identify the most effective things you can do, in the shortest period of time, to reduce risk,” Guyette said in a statement. “Averlon is a powerful platform that allows enterprises to map exactly how an attacker can compromise an environment. By understanding the attacker’s view, Averlon gives CISOs and their teams unparalleled ability to prioritize what an attacker can explore or exploit to pinpoint threats, predict attacks, and to mitigate them.”

Customers can use Averlon’s attack chain analysis to narrow the scope of the investigation and simplify the process of determining the impact so security teams can move quicker to contain, eradicate, and recover from incidents, the release said.