UPTYCS

Ganesh Pai had done this before. He co-founded a company called Verivue, sold it to Akamai, and became a chief architect there.

In 2016 he started Uptycs in Waltham, Massachusetts with one specific idea. There was an open-source tool called osquery, originally built at Facebook, that let you ask questions about any machine as if it were a database.

Pai figured you could point that same approach at everything a company runs. Laptops, servers, cloud accounts, containers.

One language to see it all. So instead of buying five different security tools that do not talk to each other, you would have one that does.

Companies pay Uptycs to watch their entire computing footprint for threats and mistakes. That means laptops, cloud servers, and the containers running modern apps.

Uptycs collects a flood of data from all of it and flags the dangerous stuff. A misconfigured cloud bucket.

A laptop acting strange. A container with a known hole in it.

It is sold as a subscription to mid-size and large companies. The pitch is consolidation.

Replace a pile of overlapping security tools with one platform and one bill.

The core is the Uptycs unified security platform. It combines two things the industry usually sells separately.

CNAPP, which is cloud security that catches risky setups and misconfigurations in your cloud accounts. And XDR, which watches laptops and servers for active threats.

The glue underneath is osquery, the open-source tool that treats every machine like a database you can query. The selling point is watching a threat move from a developer laptop all the way to the production cloud in one connected view.

Uptycs leaned hard on osquery as its way in the door. Security teams already trusted the open-source tool.

Uptycs offered to take that familiar thing and run it at enterprise scale without the headache. That built credibility with technical buyers who hate being sold to.

The company also rode the shift to cloud and containers. As companies moved off their own servers, they needed something that could watch laptops and cloud in the same place.

Uptycs pitched itself as the single screen for both.

The competition is the whole story. Endpoint security has CrowdStrike, worth tens of billions.

Cloud security has Wiz, which Google agreed to buy for around $32 billion. Uptycs is trying to do both at once with $93 million in total funding.

That is a slingshot against two tanks. The bet that one unified platform beats a stack of specialist tools is reasonable.

It is just hard to win on every front when richer rivals dominate each one. The challenge is simple to say and painful to solve.

Stay relevant and funded while giants spend more on marketing than Uptycs has raised in its entire life.

Uptycs raised $93 million across three rounds. ForgePoint Capital and Comcast Ventures led a $10 million Series A in 2018.

Sapphire Ventures led a $30 million Series B in 2020. Norwest Venture Partners led a $50 million Series C in 2021, with ServiceNow Ventures joining.

The ServiceNow money is the interesting part. It hints at the kind of big enterprise software player that might one day buy a company like this.