Sonrai Security Raises $18.5 Million, Launches Cloud Data Control Service

A cybersecurity and cloud data protection startup led by the former co-founder and CEO of Q1 Labs, one of New Brunswick’s best-known startup exit stories, has just closed a Series A funding round of $18.5 million and is set to launch in the coming months.

The round was led by Polaris Partners and TenEleven Ventures, both of which are venture capital investments firms operating out of the United States, with the NBIF joining in a supporting role. Sonrai Security’s pledge to increase investment in New Brunswick and the province’s wider cybersecurity sector, centered around its existing engineering and customer support offices in Fredericton’s Knowledge Park, served as a primary motivating factor for the NBIF in the funding agreement.

Sonrai co-founders Brendan Hannigan and Sandy Bird have longstanding ties to New Brunswick, having served as the CEO and co-founder, respectively, of Q1 Labs, the company that propelled New Brunswick into the global cybersecurity arena. After Q1 was purchased by IBM for a reported $600 million in 2011, Hannigan stayed on as the General Manager of the newly created IBM Security division, with Bird acting as the division’s Chief Technology Officer. It was during their time at IBM that the two men devised the concept for Sonrai, based on their shared realization that organizations were underreporting the volume and nature of their cloud data assets and existing data security platforms were ill-suited to mitigate the varied risks facing these accounts.

“Cloud adoption affords us a unique opportunity to reimagine how we secure corporate data, and to make a clean break from the limitations of device, data center and perimeter-centric security,” said Hannigan. “By putting data and identity at the center of a security model that spans cloud providers and third-party data stores, Sonrai Security offers a level of control and security never possible in a traditional enterprise network.”

This investment round is one of the largest that the NBIF has ever participated in, and is a milestone for the people within the organization who were instrumental in helping it along.

“We’re starting to see that we can actually start getting some of the larger deals that we’ve just never seen before in New Brunswick,” said NBIF Director of Investments Ray Fitzpatrick. “It really helps put New Brunswick on the map. Hopefully, this has other investors looking here and realizing that it’s not a disadvantage being located in New Brunswick, and that the companies can be very successful.”

The NBIF is thrilled to support data security and analytics intelligence innovation at Sonrai Security, and we can’t wait to see where the company’s brilliant founders will lead the cybersecurity sector next.