Proceeds to launch Kivera, a new cloud security company and product
Sourced Group Worldwide Inc. (“Sourced”) has received CAD $2.5 million from existing investor, Round 13 Capital to launch a new company and product, Kivera.
Kivera, incubated within Sourced, is a cloud security product that applies governance policies universally and consistently across an enterprise’s multi-cloud environments. Kivera provides developers with the freedom to choose the best orchestration tool for the job, native or otherwise, while bolstering the organisation’s security posture through continual assurance.
With operations in Sydney and Toronto, Kivera will be led by product co-founders, Vernon Jefferson and Neil Brown, who will be stepping away from Sourced to take on the roles of CTO and VP of Operations respectively. The role of interim CEO will be held by Sourced CEO, Jonathan Spinks who will join interim CFO, Wilson Lee, Vernon Jefferson and Round 13 on the Board of Directors.
“Through years of consulting, we consistently observed tensions between security teams working to preserve the integrity of cloud environments and application teams wanting to focus on innovating their applications rather than navigating rigid control structures”, says Neil Brown.
“Striking a balance is further complicated by the ever-increasing number of cloud services and possible configurations. In fact, according to Gartner, ‘nearly all successful attacks on cloud services are a result of customer misconfiguration, mismanagement and mistakes’1. Kivera helps solve this by enabling uniform and granular policy enforcement across any cloud and any tool. Your cloud. Your rules,” continues Brown. “We are currently working with a number of businesses, including a large Australian financial services organisation, in beta testing ahead of a formal launch in Q1 2021.”
Kivera has been incubated through Sourced’s internal ‘Innovators Fund’ program which enables employees to harness their entrepreneurial spirit and bring to life new solutions borne from the challenges they experience every day, alongside their clients.
“Vernon and Neil have been instrumental in bringing Kivera to life. They identified a true client need and have successfully driven the product’s development to date,” says Spinks. “Their achievements are a clear reflection of Sourced’s commitment to our innovation value and we are thrilled to have our first graduates from the Innovators Fund leading Kivera through this exciting next phase.”
This latest funding comes less than a year after Sourced closed a CAD $20 million funding round, also led by Toronto-based Round 13 Capital, with participation from Comerica Bank and HSBC.
“Sourced has been a leader in enterprise-wide cloud transformation for the past ten years and we are delighted to witness their continued innovation having followed Kivera’s growth since its inception”, says John Eckert, co-founder at Round 13 Capital. “We look forward to supporting the team on their new venture. Now more than ever, with the rapid adoption of cloud services, safeguarding one’s security is of paramount importance.”
For more information about Kivera, visit www.kivera.io.
1Gartner, Solution Path for Security in the Public Cloud, Richard Bartley, 30 January 2020
