It is with great pride that I announce Hydden, The Identity Visibility Company, has successfully closed a $4.4 million Series Seed funding round. This round was led by Access Venture Partners and supported by Lockstep, the venture fund of Rinki Sethi (VP and CISO of Bill.com) and Lucas Moody (CISO of Alteryx), as well as Service Provider Capital. We are also excited to welcome the participation of all-star angel cybersecurity investors Andy Grolnick (CEO of Graylog and former CEO of LogRhythm) and Paul Trulove (former CPO of SailPoint).
Identity security is a top priority for every cybersecurity team worldwide. In 2024, companies face an unprecedented surge in attacks as adversaries increasingly target vulnerabilities in identity infrastructure. To stay ahead, security teams must have a comprehensive understanding of every identity within their systems, while also uncovering deeper, high-value intelligence on hidden identity threats that often go undetected.
At Hydden, we are driven by a mission to fundamentally transform how security teams address the identity attack surface. Identity visibility is a crucial aspect of Identity Attack Surface Management (IASM), and through continuous discovery, Hydden delivers unparalleled visibility and control.
The Hydden platform is engineered as a lightweight and powerful framework, continuously identifying and monitoring all identities across hybrid infrastructures, whether cloud-based, on-premises, or a combination of both. By extracting and enriching identity data from disparate components of IAM infrastructure, Hydden builds a unified data layer, enabling security teams to quickly identify identity-related risks that are too often overlooked.
When my co-founder Paul Harper and I embarked on this journey, our belief was that many identity threats stem from gaps within fragmented IAM technologies. Every identity, whether human or non-human (think machine), represents a potential entry point for adversaries. These risks, while sometimes visible, are often concealed within a complex web of disparate systems – hence the name, Hydden!
Paul and I have extensive experience building identity security products at leading IAM companies like Thycotic, Delinea, and BeyondTrust, where our solutions have been deployed within Fortune 50 organizations. Despite the significant investments these organizations made in their security programs, we frequently observed that identity breaches continued to occur. These breaches were often the result of poor identity hygiene – such as misconfigured IAM tools, dormant or orphaned accounts, recycled passwords, and accounts with weak or absent multi-factor authentication (MFA).
We believed the persistence of these issues could partly be explained by the realities of today’s IAM programs:
- Siloed teams managing separate phases of IAM (e.g., IGA, PAM, CIEM).
- Complex, bloated IAM platforms requiring extensive professional services to maintain.
- Legacy technologies ill-equipped to handle the scale, complexity, and security demands of modern hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructures.
Given these challenges, it is understandable why so few organizations maintain a unified source of truth around identity. To address this, we built a new approach to discovery based on three key principles:
- Interoperability: Our framework integrates seamlessly with any on-premises or cloud data source – identity providers, business applications, infrastructure, databases, file shares, and unstructured data – with no exceptions.
- Flexibility: Our solution can be deployed across any infrastructure. Whether it’s on-prem, Linux, private cloud, Windows, Mac, or even mainframe environments, Hydden is fully agnostic, ensuring infrastructure never becomes a barrier to adoption.
- Performance: To support continuous discovery, our architecture enables customers to run discovery at any frequency or interval. Point-in-time inventories of identities and accounts are inadequate for modern cyber defense; fast scan times and rapid data retrieval are essential.
Most importantly, we designed Hydden to complement the other tools in your IAM stack – PAM vaults, IGA solutions, and MDR or ITSM technologies that fortify your broader security ecosystem. Discovery is at the heart of what we do, and the identity data layer we build empowers the other tools within your security arsenal. At Hydden, we are firm believers that modern cybersecurity requires collaboration, not competition, between vendors. Security teams need more connectivity and automation to effectively counter adversaries who are often steps ahead.
I consider myself truly fortunate to work alongside a team of talented cybersecurity professionals at Hydden – many of whom I’ve had the privilege of working with across multiple successful ventures over the past decade. This funding round marks a significant milestone in our journey, and the support of Access Venture Partners, Lockstep, and our exceptional advisors will enable us to bring Hydden’s capabilities to a broader range of organizations, both large and small. I want to extend my deepest gratitude to our customers, partners, and employees for their trust and commitment.
The road ahead is exciting – let’s buckle up!
Press release: https://hydden.com/news/hydden-secures-4-4m-seed-round/
