
Cloud security fears are nothing new to any cloud user who is even remotely aware of the news. Even those practically living under a rock would surely have heard of last year’s NSA’s Prism scandal or most recently the celebrity photo leak taken from their iCloud accounts. Amongst those who are most concerned are enterprise customers who have been extremely reluctant to migrate to the cloud despite the multitude of benefits. Around five years ago a startup by the name of Duo Security emerged to quash those very fears.
As its’ name suggests, Duo Security offers two levels of security through cloud-based two-factor authentication. In the last five years they have built up an impressive portfolio and currently service over 5,000 organizations worldwide. Amongst the better known of these include Facebook, Paramount Pictures, Box, Toyota, and Yelp.
Just recently they reported some exciting changes to help further their success. Firstly it was announced that the company has raised $12 Million in a Series B round of funding from Benchmark. Additionally, they have added Matt Cohler, general partner at Benchmark to their board.
Matt is reported as saying, “Dug Song and Jon Oberheide are the kind of passionate and ambitious entrepreneurs Benchmark is proud to back and work alongside,…Smartphone proliferation, the shift in IT environments to the cloud, and business users’ increased expectations for consumer-grade enterprise software products give Duo Security the opportunity to lead and change the face of the security market in a post-firewall world.”
Duo Security is excited to have Matt join the board, as Dug Song CEO of Duo Security is reported as saying, “We are incredibly excited to welcome Matt and Benchmark to the Duo Security team as we work to meet the challenges of protecting our customers’ users, devices, and services…With this additional financing, we can continue to scale our sales, marketing, and product development to build a strong security solution to protect organizations worldwide.”
Benchmark is no stranger to the world of cloud computing; their current portfolio includes companies such as Wix, Snapchat, Quip, Zuora, and Zendesk.
This investment round will allow Duo Security to extend their services beyond their current portfolio. “We’ve always had ambitions beyond two-factor authentication to build a unified security platform that empowers the mid-market to appropriately protect themselves,” said Jon Oberheide, CTO and co-founder of Duo Security. “We’re on a mission to democratize effective security technologies for everyone, not just the Fortune 500.”