Israeli cybersecurity company Semperis said on Thursday it had raised $125 million in funding from JPMorgan and Hercules Capital, valuing it at more than $1 billion. Semperis raised $200 million in Series C funding two years ago.
Unlike two years ago, the latest round includes both equity and debt. In addition to the fundraising, Semperis also announced the appointments of Jeff Bray as CFO, Mike DeGaetano as chief revenue officer and Annabelle Lewis as chief legal officer and corporate secretary as it prepares for a future IPO.
Headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey, Semperis was founded in 2013 by CEO Michael Bresman, Chief Technology Officer Guy Teberovsky and Matan Liberman, who serves as executive vice president of business development and leads the company’s Tel Aviv office.
The company focuses on Microsoft’s Active Directory, a directory service widely used by Fortune 500 companies across industries, and offers identity security solutions for hybrid Active Directory users. The company’s disaster recovery systems know how to detect and neutralize cyber attacks and automatically restore organizational activity.
Speaking to Calcalist after the company was named the Most Promising Israeli Startup of 2023, Matan Lieberman explained why the company didn’t follow the typical path for an Israeli cyber entrepreneur, which includes starting out in one of the tech wings of the military intelligence corps, building an extensive network, receiving investment from veteran angel investors in the industry, and a supportive business environment. “We’re an unusual bunch. We weren’t in the tech wings of the IDF,” Lieberman said. “Mickey was in the Navy, I was in the Prime Minister’s Office, Guy was in the infantry, and we both served in the infantry reserves.”
“Guy worked as a consultant for Microsoft, visiting organisations all over the world to help them prepare for disasters in the world of enterprise security. One of those organisations was the Prime Minister’s Office, where I worked as a development team lead. As part of our collaboration, Guy spoke to me about the difficulties of recovering systems after a disaster, and how organisations are unaware of this. One of the organisations Guy met with was a bank that didn’t even realise they couldn’t recover their systems.
“Mickey [Brezman]Guy’s best friend was running a recovery consulting company. They got together and decided that this market situation was only going to get worse, so they decided to start a company to develop technology for rapid disaster recovery. They asked me to be their co-founder, we got accepted into the Microsoft Accelerator program, and the rest is history.”
