Last month, at Amazon’s re:Invent conference, Threat Stack launched its cloud security solution out of beta during Amazon CTO Werner Vogel’s startup launch keynote. The service helps companies that want to use Amazon’s cloud computing service to monitor their infrastructure and applications for potential threats. As more businesses start adopting public clouds, the need for services like this is also increasing, something the venture capital community has also realized and Threat Stack today announced that it has raised a $5 million Series A1 round of additional funding.
The round was led by Atlas Ventures and .406 Ventures — both of which also invested in the company’s $1.2 million seed and $2.7 million Series A rounds. The company plans to use it to continue the development of its service and to acquire new customers.
I asked Threat Stack CEO Doug Cahill why the team decided to go out and raise more money so soon after closing its Series A round. “Market reception to Threat Stack during our beta program and since we’ve launched has been so strong that it made sense at this stage to employ additional capital to drive growth via expansion of go-to-market initiatives and acceleration of the product roadmap,” he told me.
“To address privacy and security challenges in the cloud, there exists a shared responsibility between customers and their Cloud Service Providers (CSP),” said Cahill. “Threat Stack provides a security solution that complements their CSPs existing set of security controls, and gives them a comprehensive security architecture for all their cloud resources. This latest round of funding demonstrates the support and confidence they have in the Threat Stack team as we make our move to expand and grab market share.”
Threat Stack argues that there is a visibility gap in cloud environments. Given that you don’t have direct access to your hardware, you also don’t get access to traditional intrusion detects systems and hardware-based security controls (though the cloud providers will often provide at least some basic controls). Threat Stack helps its users monitor their systems, but it also allows them to play back the actions of every user at any point in time (even after an instance has been stopped and destroyed). It also allows you to monitor key file for changes and to host-level intrusion detection.
 
