Cyber security startup Plerion raises $10m in seed round backed by Atlassian Ventures

Founded by industry veterans Mike Rahmati, Paul Garner, and Pierre Liddle, Sydney-headquartered Plerion's platform helps clients proactively identify, prioritise, and mitigate risks within their cloud operating environments.

The funding, following a $4.7 million pre-seed round in March last year of which more than half came from the founding team, will go towards accelerated product development, talent acquisition, and go-to-market strategies.

"We are thrilled to have successfully closed our seed round funding, which is a testament to the strength of our team, vision, and the groundbreaking work we are doing in cybersecurity," says Plerion co-founder and CEO Mike Rahmati.

"This investment will empower us to enhance our capabilities further, hire top-tier talent, and drive the adoption of our cutting-edge solutions to protect businesses and individuals from cyber threats."

Co-founder and COO Paul Garner describes the funding as a key milestone for Plerion.

"It affords us the ability to accelerate the early traction that we've received since our commercial launch at the start of 2023," Garner says.

"We'll seek to deploy the funds to build a robust & capital-efficient go-to-market engine. In addition, we will continue to expand our engineering function to ensure that we continue to innovate against market needs at a fast pace."

Co-founder and CTO Pierre Liddle says data shows that on a bad day on the cloud usually results from identity, configuration or vulnerability management not being done effectively.

"Plerion helps customers with all three key security domains, and many more. In parallel, we've also built a first-of-its-kind platform that empowers MSSP (managed security service provider) partners to scale their impact across the industry and deliver improved security outcomes for all customers," Liddle says.

Sachin Bhanot, head of Southeast Asia and Australia-New Zealand investments for Prosus Ventures, says Plerion has demonstrated impressive early adoption and traction, with a founding team that has strong experience and expertise in the domain.

MJ Yu, managing director at Cercano, notes cyber operating environments are becoming increasingly complex, amplifying the need for cloud security solutions that are comprehensive, integrated and intelligent.

"We see immense potential in the cloud-native, multi-tenanted, and agentless platform that Plerion is building and are also very excited to join repeating founders and team on this journey," says Yu.

The group claims to differentiate itself through innovative methodologies and a proactive approach to combating cyber threats, which in practice means providing context to risk, allowing organisations to "strip out inefficiencies or false alerts", helping to "rid teams of fatigue".

The company's suite of cybersecurity offered through their cloud security platform includes cloud native application protection (CNAPP), cloud security posture management (CSPM), workload and vulnerability management, cloud infrastructure and entitlements management (CIEM), data security posture management (DSPM), shift left security, cloud detection and response (CDR), compliance, and more.

"Plerion's all-in-one security platform, combined with their visionary approach to protecting digital assets, aligns perfectly with Atlassian’s efforts to make prioritising security dead-simple," says Peter Lenke, head of Atlassian Ventures.

"We believe Plerion's elegant solution will scale well for our 200,000-plus cloud customers, especially our enterprise customers, and we are excited to support their journey," he says.