CommandK raises $3m to become the command center for enterprise security

February 16, 2023 at 10:30 AM EST

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Companies today adopt various strategies to protect their sensitive data – data such as secrets, e.g., API tokens, SSH keys or passwords; PII data, including customer phone numbers or emails; and business-sensitive data such as company financials or intellectual property. The solutions adopted often involve multiple DIY tools. Moreover, these solutions are cobbled together by generalist developers instead of security specialists. At fast-growing mid to late-stage companies, the burden on developers to move fast is too high, and security often becomes an afterthought.

Addressing this pressing security concern, CommandK is announcing today a $3M seed round led by Lightspeed to help companies – and developers within these companies – achieve higher security standards with little to no change management at their end. The round also saw participation from a range of angel investors*.

CommandK founders: ( L to R) Jayesh Sidhwani and Rohan Prabhu

CommandK manages the end-to-end lifecycle of sensitive data. Starting with secure storage, secure sharing with programs, third-party services, or authorized users, and simplifying compliance controls by replacing multiple point solutions with a single platform. This approach ensures there is zero developer dependency in managing sensitive data, allowing security teams to get the highest order of security while letting developers focus on building features. CommandK is deployed as a managed solution within the company’s virtual private cloud, ensuring that sensitive data never leaves the company’s network.

The CommandK platform flags data violations to teams

Jayesh Sidhwani, co-founder of CommandK, commented: “Large web-scale companies have resources to build internal tools that allow developers to build secure products; however, these tools need constant upgrades in the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape. Unless the companies have a dedicated team to focus on this problem, the company’s overall security posture keeps falling behind. Companies cannot put data security on the back burner any longer. In 2022 alone, companies spent an average of $5M in a single instance of a data breach. About half of the breaches involved leaked secrets or sensitive data. At the same time, because security is a niche skill, hiring security engineers isn’t easy or scalable. We built CommandK to fill this gap.”

Jayesh Sidhwani (CEO) and Rohan Prabhu (CTO), the co-founders of CommandK, have worked in infrastructure and engineering roles at companies such as Disney+ Hotstar, Jupiter, Amazon, and Google. At Hotstar – a live and on-demand OTT service in India – Jayesh helped build the core platform that holds the world record for the most concurrent live connections on an internet product (25 million). Rohan built some of the most sophisticated backend infrastructure for Jupiter, one of India’s fastest-growing neo-banks. CommandK has been built on top of the years of experience the founders have had to solve this issue in their prior roles.

CommandK team is helping companies improve security standards

Hemant Mohapatra, partner at Lightspeed, commented: “Four undeniable shifts are happening in the world of enterprise SaaS today: developers are managing more and more code and microservices; these microservices are deployed across more and more complex on-prem and cloud environments; reliance on 3rd party services such as Twilio or Stripe is increasing rapidly; and, finally, engineering teams are not just managing code, but also a lot of the backend infra and associated configuration files, secrets, API keys, and more. Large companies such as Docker, Atlassian, and Github were built on the backs of helping developers better manage code and microservices. We believe CommandK will be the defining company in helping developers better manage their security, secrets, and config infrastructure with the same efficiency and safety as they manage their code today.”

CommandK is in a private beta phase and is already working with companies to solve their security challenges.

*Angel investors in the seed round included: Robin Vasan (Founder MangoCapital, board member of HashiCorp, Couchbase, InfluxData), Jon Gelsey (ex-CEO Auth0), Sundeep Peechu (GP Felicis), Akash Saxena (ex-CTO Disney+), Pratyus Patnaik (Sr Director Okta), Abinash Tripathy (ex-CEO Helpshift), and AllIn Capital.

About CommandK

CommandK is an early-stage cybersecurity startup. Starting in 2022, CommandK is focused on building tools that bridge the gap between achieving the highest security and the fastest velocity of shipping features. For more information, please visit https://www.commandk.dev/

About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed Venture Partners is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Fintech sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 500 companies globally, including Affirm, Carta, Cato Networks, Epic Games, Faire, Forty Seven, Guardant Health, Mulesoft, Netskope, Nutanix, Rubrik, Sharechat, Snap, TripActions, Udaan, Ultima Genomics and more. Lightspeed and its global team currently manage $18B across the Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in the U.S., China, Europe, India, Israel, and Southeast Asia. www.lsvp.com