New York City-born and Waltham-based cybersecurity startup Allure Security has closed a $5.3 million seed round. The company’s first-ever VC round, which was announced Thursday, is led by Boston-based Glasswing Ventures, with participation of Greycroft, Zetta Venture Partners and Portage Partners.
In addition to improving its data loss detection and response platform, Allure will use the money to expand its team with the addition of sales, marketing and engineering professionals. The company will approximately double its current 13-person staff by the end of 2018, Allure CEO Mark Jaffe said in an interview.
As part of the announcement, Rick Grinnell, managing partner at Glasswing Ventures, is joining Allure Security’s board of directors.
Jaffe said that he and Grinnell met around 10 years ago thanks to an introduction from another West Coast investor. Later, Grinnell became the leading investor in the Series A round of Prelert, another cybersecurity company that Jaffe co-founded in 2009 and was later acquired by Elastic in 2016.
"In the security world, we spend a lot of time protecting networks, systems and users, and we are not very good at protecting the ultimate target that adversaries have, which is data."
After completing the acquisition, Jaffe came to a new realization. "In the security world, we spend a lot of time protecting networks, systems and users, and we are not very good at protecting the ultimate target that adversaries have, which is data," Jaffe said. In early 2017, he got in touch with Salvatore Stolfo, a data security scientist at Columbia University who was working on rethinking data loss with a focus on national security. Over the summer, Jaffe took on the role of Allure Security CEO and, before the end of the year, the company relaunched in Boston.
The premise of the security software produced by Allure is that if you can't track where your data goes, there's no way you can protect it. The products that the new funding round will fuel are unique because they track the documents "wherever they go, inside or outside the network," Jaffe explained.
"Boston is a better city for this software segment," Jaffe concluded. "There are more security experts, more developers, salespeople, marketing people, who know the cybersecurity space in Boston than in New York, so hiring the best talent... is something we can do much better."
