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.
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 CEO and co-founder, Shreyas Sadalgi “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.”
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.
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