Congratulations to Luminate!
Announcing Luminate’s acquisition by Symantec
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Symantec just acquired Luminate Security, one of Aleph’s portfolio companies. We could not be more proud of the founders, Ofer Smadari, Leonid Belkind, and Eldad Livni, and are honored that they chose Aleph to accompany them on this successful journey.
We were fortunate to invest in Luminate’s seed round two years ago, when the business was three founders and a deck. While the company was growing well at the time of the acquisition, Luminate received an offer that they couldn’t refuse from Symantec, who wanted their technology to be the foundation of its next-generation infrastructure and security offerings.
Selling a company is bittersweet. We will miss our regular interactions with Ofer, Leonid, and Eldad and we wish them the best of luck at Symantec. At the same time — we are excited and proud of all that they’ve accomplished on behalf of themselves, their families, Aleph, and our Limited Partners!
Ofer, Leonid, and Eldad have vast experience in designing and selling solutions for application access, such as VPN boxes and CASBs. In 2016, they observed that the traditional network access models were not well-suited for modern architectures. Securing application access by securing network access was already insufficient, and this VPN/firewall approach was becoming more vulnerable by the day. There needed to a better way to offer access to resources in hybrid clouds and bare metal environments, without compromising on usability, security, or location. Instead of protecting one or more network perimeters, the “right” solution would enable safe and convenient access to any application, on an on-demand basis, across all locations and infrastructure types.
Luminate were the first ones to both understand and solve for this, and pioneered the category of Zero Trust Access. Their solution could split application access from network access. Some well-known and lesser-known players in this category have already adopted Luminate’s “Zero Trust” language — they tend to be agent-based solutions that invoke cloud VPNs or DMZs, which still expose the network.
Luminate’s solution was a paradigm shift — an agentless multi-tenant SaaS offering that generates a “replica” of the application outside of the network, and securely connects application and user via double proxy, at Layer 7.
What excited us about Luminate was not just the superiority of this approach to its alternatives, but how it could be a “tip of the spear” towards a broad product suite that would be useful, sticky, and priced across an entire HR population, at a strong per-employee per-month (“PEPM”) rate.
In 2018, Luminate was replacing remote access VPNs, but would soon replace SOA/API gateways, dedicated SSL proxies, and SD-WAN scenarios. And by acting at Layer 7, they could segment and control usage of a 3rd party application itself! Imagine a scenario where a non-trusted service provider could only work in certain segments of your Salesforce, with certain allowed actions, at certain times, with automatic triggers around suspicious events, such as downloads or ctrl-copy functions. This is the future of security, and this superior form of governance cannot be enforced without a Layer 7 solution like Luminate, serving as the connective tissue.
For these reasons and more, Symantec pursued the company aggressively. From access protection, to usage monitoring, to continuous visibility and assessment, Luminate’s technology renders many of their most important product offerings “best-in-class”. It also gives them a solid foundation to build the future of application security, in a market defined by growing demand for personalization and granularity on the front-end, and infrastructure sprawl on the back-end.
Thank you and congratulations guys. You will always be a part of the Aleph family!
