Lucidum, the asset discovery company that eliminates blind spots across cloud, security and IT operations, recently launched with $4 million in seed funding from GGV Capital and Silicon Valley CISO Investments (SVCI). Lucidum is founded by former security and technology leaders at Splunk and backed by nearly two dozen current or former security and technology leaders to solve the ubiquitous and fundamental challenge of asset discovery and visibility that’s preventing enterprises from efficiently managing, securing, and transforming technology.
We sat down with Joel Fulton, former CISO of Splunk and co-founder and CEO, Lucidum to discuss the company's mission, how machine learning can help solve complex enterprise data problems, and what 2021 holds for the cutting-edge startup.
Congrats on the funding. What is the company's mission? What problems do you aim to solve?
Lucidum is addressing one of the biggest problems in enterprise IT today – the fact that organizations don’t have a complete picture of all the assets on their network. This is a fundamental and widespread problem that prevents enterprises from efficiently managing, securing and transforming IT.
In order to secure an asset, manage it, and control the costs associated with it, you first need to know it exists. That seems simple, but it’s a universal challenge. That challenge is made even worse by the existence of “unknown unknowns” – assets on an IT network that organizations don’t even know they should be looking for or securing.
How does machine learning help to solve the challenge of disparate, hard to identify data across the enterprise?
The Lucidum platform employs patent-pending machine learning against a massive volume of pre-existing data to triangulate and provide context about known and unknown computers, mobile devices, cloud environments, IoT devices, microservices and other assets.
Without agents or scans, the platform identifies anything that stores, processes or transmits data and answers important questions about where an asset is, what it is, what it’s doing and how it’s being used.
Tell me about the integrations Lucidum has. How do those integrations contribute to the success of the platform?
Through an open API and a growing list of integrations with nearly 100 of the most popular tools and platforms already in use by enterprise IT organizations, the Lucidum platform feeds IT operations, security, cloud, compliance, finance and other core disciplines with critical information about the assets it identifies.
How does your background from Splunk help you lead Lucidum? What are your aspirations for the company in 2021?
I was previously CISO at Splunk and started Lucidum with Charles Feng, who was previously head of security innovations and data sciences at Splunk. Charles and I bring together exceptional experience in IT leadership and machine learning from past companies including Boeing, Nordstrom, Symantec, and Google. The idea from Lucidum came about from talking to customers at Splunk about their pain points within their organization. Most customers voiced that they didn’t know what was going on within their network.
In 2021, we expect to double the employees to support an increase in customer demand and in support of new features on our product roadmap. Expect a community edition of Lucidum in early 2021 to get asset discovery in the hands of DevOps and Security Engineers everywhere.
When will Lucidum be available to customers?
We’re currently accepting applications for early access customers and a community edition will be available in Q1 2021.
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