Lucidum, the asset discovery company that eliminates blind
spots across cloud, security and IT operations, launched today with $4 million
in seed funding from GGV Capital and Silicon Valley CISO Investments (SVCI). Lucidum is founded by former
security and technology leaders at Splunk and backed by nearly two dozen
current or former security and technology leaders to solve the ubiquitous and
fundamental challenge of asset discovery and visibility that’s preventing
enterprises from efficiently managing, securing, and transforming technology.
“You
can’t secure what you can’t see or don’t know about, never mind control costs
and their impact on your business. It really is that simple and it’s a
challenge I’ve seen firsthand at every organization I’ve worked at or with –
it’s the
reason we started Lucidum,” said Joel Fulton, CEO and co-founder of
Lucidum, and former CISO of Splunk. “Asset visibility is perhaps the most
fundamental challenge today in enterprise IT because everything else depends on
it. By illuminating every corner of a network – finding even the unknown
unknowns – we empower organizations to improve every other aspect of their IT,
cloud, and security operations.”
The
Lucidum platform employs patent-pending machine learning against a massive
volume of pre-existing data to triangulate and provide context about known and
unknown computers, mobile devices, cloud environments, IoT devices,
microservices, and other technology assets. Without agents or scans, Lucidum
identifies anything that stores, processes, or transmits data and answers
important questions about where an asset is, what it is, what it’s doing, and
how it’s being used.
Through
a growing list of integrations with nearly 100 of the most popular tools and
platforms already in use by enterprise IT organizations, and an open API, the
Lucidum platform feeds IT operations, security, cloud, compliance, finance, and
other core disciplines with critical information about the assets it
identifies.
“In
many ways, Lucidum is like Splunk for asset discovery because of how it ingests
a flood of data and condenses it in a way that gives organizations the
information and context they need to take action,” said Oren Yunger who leads
cybersecurity investments at GGV Capital and is also a founding member of SVCI
– both investors in Lucidum. “Beyond its leadership team, one of the very
compelling things about Lucidum is its laser focus. While many other companies
in the space try to do everything, Lucidum is focused on doing one thing –
asset discovery and visibility – extremely well. And that one thing is a
critical foundation for everything else.”
As
part of Lucidum’s seed funding, Yunger is joining the company’s board of
directors.
Lucidum’s
co-founders are Joel Fulton, former CISO at Splunk, and Charles Feng, former
head of security innovations and data science at Splunk. The founding team
brings exceptional experience in IT leadership and machine learning from
companies including Boeing, Nordstrom, Symantec, and Google.
Lucidum
was built in conjunction with senior security leaders at global organizations
across industries. Its investors include CISOs and senior IT leaders at
companies including Levi’s, Cerner, Cimpress, Malwarebytes, Ross Stores, Medallia,
TaskUs, Signal Sciences Corp., and Rocket Software.
“Effective
IT and security management fundamentally starts with understanding what assets
we have and what state they’re in,” said Ralph Pyne, head of security at
NextRoll, an early access customer. “Lucidum automatically provides us with an
accurate, risk-scored picture of our entire environment, including all unknown
unknowns. I expect our investment in Lucidum will yield a 10x ROI resulting
from greater efficiency of other tools and a more accurate representation of
the problems we need to solve.”
“The
idea that IT teams can lasso every single new asset brought on the corporate
network is one that everyone aspires to but is almost utopian,” said Gary
Miller, vice president and head of security at TaskUs, another early access
customer. “Based on their vision and track record of identifying how it can be
accomplished at Splunk and other companies, this is a problem that Joel and
Charles were born to solve. By providing persistent hooks into all systems of
record across our ever-changing environment, Lucidum gives us an always-on,
centralized asset register that brings IT utopia within reach.”
The Lucidum platform is now
available to a limited number of early access customers and a community edition
will be available in Q1 2021.
Leave a Reply