Palerra, Interview with CEO Rohit Gupta

Rohit-Gupta-HeadshotCloud security automation company Palerra has just completed a $17m Series B financing round  (read here). In conjunction with the closing announcement, Rohit Gupta, founder and CEO of the Silicon Valley-based company, answered our questions about the company, the product, the funding and future plans.

FinSMEs: Hi Rohit, can you tell us a bit about you?
Rohit: I am a software lifer, living the dream here in Silicon Valley, with my wife, Mayuri and my two kids, Riya and Rien. I’m a big believer that each of us makes our own destiny, and whether it’s at work or outside of work, I give a 100% to all I do.

FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Palerra. What’s the opportunity you found in the market?
Rohit: The idea behind Palerra is really simple. With the adoption of Cloud and SaaS being massive, the velocity of threats increasing at a historic pace and the skills to deal with them being at a premium, manual methods for security don’t work – and automation is the only way to deal with the scale. That’s what Palerra is – a simple, SaaS service to automate security from threat detection to incident response for an organization’s entire cloud footprint.

FinSMEs: How does it work?
Rohit: Palerra’s ground-breaking SaaS service is called LORIC – and it works entirely from the cloud and through the browser. There’s no hardware to setup, no software to install, no agents to deploy or proxies to wire; nothing all. You point LORIC to the SaaS/Cloud service you want to monitor (such as Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, AWS, etc) and that’s it. LORIC does everything from there onwards to deliver threat analytics, breach discovery and incident remediation, all of this without changing user experience.

FinSMEs: Where are you in terms of growth?
Rohit: Palerra is growing nicely across all vectors. We have clients across multiple industries such as financial services and banking, consumer hospitality, hi-tech, higher education and more. Our clients are both in the Americas and overseas. And to support our growth, we continue to hire rapidly across every major function be it sales & marketing or engineering and research. It’s a great time to join Palerra.

FinSMEs: You just raised your series B round? What can you tell us? How are you using the funds?
Rohit: We’re thrilled to be backed by premier venture firms such as Norwest Venture Partners, August Capital and Wing Ventures. The Series B positions us very well and we intend to use the new capital to increase sales and marketing efforts, as well as to enhance our innovation on LORIC, our patent-pending SaaS service.

FinSMEs: Future plans?
Rohit: Information Security has long had this taint – that it’s a blocker, presenting hurdles and preventing the business from getting stuff done quickly. Palerra intends to change this. My belief has always been that the best security and the best surveillance is automated and never comes in the way of doing business – and that’s the vision we are executing on.

FinSMEs

07/04/2015

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