Identity Security Startup Veza Gets Funding For Channel Growth

The funding comes from The Syndicate Group, an investment firm founded by Trace3 Co-Founder Chad Cardenas — which plans to bring Veza’s offering to its network of solution providers.

Veza, a startup focused on providing a better way to visualize identity security risks, announced Tuesday it has raised new funding that’s targeted toward ramping up its expansion with channel partners.

The new funding for Veza comes from The Syndicate Group, an investment firm whose network includes more than 450 companies in the channel. The Syndicate Group was founded in 2017 by CEO Chad Cardenas, the co-founder and former president of Trace3.

Los Gatos, Calif.-based Veza did not disclose the amount of funding in the new round. The startup had previously raised $125 million in funding since its founding in 2020 by CEO Tarun Thakur, CTO Maohua Lu and Chief Architect Robert Whitcher. The three Veza founders had previously worked for tech vendors including Datos IO, which was acquired by Rubrik in 2018.

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Veza specializes in helping organizations to improve their security around access permissions and privileges, with a focus on providing a visual view for more easily spotting anomalous and risky permissions.

The tool also enables monitoring of permissions activity, automation of access reviews and remediation of privilege violations. The Veza platform works across identity and data systems, cloud infrastructure, SaaS and custom-built apps.

At Socium Security, which has been partnering with Veza for the past year, many of its mid-market customers are recognizing that they “didn’t have a cloud governance model in mind” when they moved to the cloud, said Adam Couch, managing partner at the Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.-based professional and managed services firm.

“They don’t necessarily know what they have from a systems perspective. They don’t know how they’re connecting to it over the network. And then they don’t know who is connecting to it,” Couch told CRN. “And so that’s been a big problem that has only grown over the last five years, as cloud has been more prevalent”

Veza’s identity security platform has offered a simplified approach to addressing the issues, which also can be implemented rapidly, he said.

“Veza helps with understanding the ‘what,’ from a system and data perspective, and then the ‘who’ — which is a large part of the problem,” Couch said. “You can’t really secure what you don’t know that you have. And you can’t secure the people accessing those systems and data if you don’t know who it is.”

Ultimately, “Veza can quickly integrate, quickly scale and provide value for that mid-market,” he said. “I see that as a big opportunity.”

Couch added that he is encouraged to see the new investment from The Syndicate Group, which Socium has been working with for the past two years. For solution and service providers, The Syndicate Group “provides a lot of early access to companies like Veza that are going to probably have hyper growth and [produce] exponential value over a short amount of time,” he said.

In a news release, Veza said that the funding from The Syndicate Group will “accelerate the execution and growth of Veza’s channel partnership program,” in part through the startup tapping into the firm’s network of solution and service providers.

Previous investors in Veza have included Accel, Bain Capital, GV, Ballistic Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and True Ventures.