Rubrik To Acquire Cloud Data Security Startup Laminar

The data security vendor says the acquisition of Laminar will enable Rubrik to provide a ‘complete cyber posture and cyber recovery offering.’

Laminar CEO Amit Shaked

Rubrik announced Tuesday it has reached an agreement to acquire Laminar, a startup that offers a data security platform for public cloud environments and cloud-based data warehouses.

Financial terms of the planned acquisition were not disclosed by Rubrik. A source close to the agreement put the value of the acquisition at more than $100 million, with the deal including both cash and stock.

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Calcalist had reported in May that Rubrik was among several companies negotiating to acquire Laminar.

Laminar’s platform supports AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, as well as Snowflake and Google’s BigQuery data warehouse. Key data security capabilities include posture management — used for enforcing policy and and protecting sensitive data — as well as access governance, threat monitoring and threat response.

The addition of Laminar’s technology to the Rubrik data security platform will “create the industry’s first complete cyber posture and cyber recovery offering of its kind,” Rubrik said in a news release.

In the release, Rubrik touted Laminar’s capabilities for improving visibility into data located within cloud environments.

In April, Laminar added support for Google Cloud and Snowflake to its data security posture management (DSPM) offering — making it “the first cloud-native data security platform to support all major cloud service providers and data warehouse environments,” the company said at the time.

Then in June, Laminar unveiled “built-in” data security offering for AWS that “automatically installs, configures and integrates with native AWS Cloud Foundational Services across multiple domains,” the company said, noting that it was “the only start-up security partner” the June launch.

In the news release Tuesday, Laminar Co-Founder and CEO Amit Shaked pointed to the “synergy” between the startup and Rubrik, which he called “a company that cares just as deeply about ensuring that customers are prepared against the inevitable.”

Rubrik’s planned acquisition of Laminar was announced with the Black Hat 2023 conference underway this week in Las Vegas.

In January, Rubrik disclosed that it had crossed $500 million in annual recurring revenue, which is in the same ballpark as some of the cybersecurity industry’s publicly traded firms. At the time, Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha told CRN that “obviously, at some point we want to be a public company.”

In June, Reuters reported that Rubrik had hired three banks to assist with a planned IPO.

Rubrik’s advantage, Sinha told CRN in January, is that “from day one” the company was committed to an architecture for its data protection software built on zero trust, involving steeper requirements for user access to data and greater control for organizations.

As a result, “we are the only zero trust data security platform,” Sinha said. “And that’s what is driving our demand, because that’s what businesses need. They need to have a platform where you can only interact with the platform with full authentication.”

By contrast, he said, “the classic backup and recovery architecture is a ‘full trust’ architecture.”

Laminar, meanwhile, has been expanding its cloud data security platform including with new capabilities in April that make it the “only pure-play DSPM that provides comprehensive enterprise-wide multi-user capabilities,” the startup said in a news release at the time.

Key features that were added in that update included the introduction of the Laminar Executive Data Landscape Dashboard, which provides instant visibility into data risk and security gaps, along with “best-in-class” support for role-based access control (RBAC) ensuring that authorized users have controlled access to data policies and system administration.

Founded out of Tel Aviv in 2020, Laminar had reported raising a total of $67 million in funding. Rubrik said it will locate an R&D center in Tel Aviv based upon the addition of the Laminar team.