Panther Labs Raises $15M Series A to Reinvent SIEM for Cloud-First Security Teams

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Panther Labs, a cybersecurity startup led by Airbnb and AWS alumni, has raised $15 million in Series A funding to accelerate development of its open source security platform designed as an alternative to legacy SIEMs. Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP) led the round with participation from S28 Capital, Innovation Endeavors, and Fathom Capital. The investment brings the company's total funding to $20.5 million, and Gaurav Gupta, partner at LSVP, will join the board of directors.

With the rising adoption of cloud platforms and services, security teams are struggling to centralize and monitor activity across environments at scale. Panther provides an open, scalable, and developer-friendly solution for security engineers at cloud-first organizations, like GitLab, to detect and respond to suspicious activity in real time. 

"The amount of data GitLab needs to analyze for security insights is enormous and growing rapidly," said Kyle Smith, Security Manager at GitLab. "We evaluated several industry-leading SIEM solutions and found their rules engines too inflexible and management overhead too large. With Panther, we were able to seamlessly integrate their tools into our existing development and deployment workflows. Panther's serverless architecture, Python-based detection framework, and open data formats provide the scalable and future-proofed foundation we need to protect our most important assets."

Panther can ingest terabytes of security log data per day from a variety of sources including AWS and GCP, security tools like Osquery and OSSEC, and a growing number of SaaS applications such as G Suite, Okta, and OneLogin. As data is processed, detections are run and alerts are dispatched in real-time to destinations like Slack, Jira, and PagerDuty. Collected data is normalized and retained to power future investigations in a serverless data lake powered by AWS or the cloud-native data platform, Snowflake.

"Security practitioners should spend their time crafting high-fidelity detections to identify threats, but instead, they spend the bulk of their time on operations," said Panther CEO Jack Naglieri. "Our team faced these challenges at extreme scale at Airbnb and Amazon, and we built Panther to help security teams everywhere operationalize cloud-scale data volumes with low overhead and code-driven automation."

"Serverless and developer-centric is simply the best way for organizations to address their myriad of security challenges," said Gaurav Gupta, partner at LSVP. "Automation and scale are paramount for under-resourced security teams, and Panther Labs is perfectly positioned to capture that demand. If your company is increasing its usage of cloud services while also facing challenges with security visibility and threat detection, Panther will be an immediate multiplier on your security investment."

Panther Labs was founded in 2018 by former Airbnb security alumni Jack Naglieri. During his time at Airbnb, Naglieri architected  StreamAlert, a popular open source security project used by teams at organizations like Netflix, Coinbase, and Duo Security. This journey inspired his vision for Panther. With this round of funding, Panther will invest in key functions including sales, marketing, security, and engineering, with additional features coming to make its platform smarter, more portable, and easier to use.

DevSecOps Webinar: September 10, 2020 from 11:00 a.m. to Noon Pacific. Learn how to identify common and specialized cybersecurity attacks with Python detections and developer-friendly workflows. Register here: https://runpanther.io/webinars/writing-custom-python-detections-with-panther/

About Panther Labs
Panther Labs is a cybersecurity company specializing in cloud-scale detection and response. The team includes security alumni from companies like Amazon and Airbnb. Panther's security platform is serverless and open source, and helps organizations prevent breaches by providing actionable insights from large volumes of data. With Panther, teams can perform continuous security monitoring, achieve end-to-end security visibility across cloud and on-premise infrastructure, and build a robust security data lake to power investigations. Learn more at https://runpanther.io/

SOURCE Panther Labs Inc.