SPHERE: Defining Identity Hygiene

Today we couldn’t be more excited to announce Sphere’s $31 million Series B financing led by Edison Partners, with our continued participation.

Identity and Access Management is the most crucially important area of security – once an identity is breached, everything else follows. Many existing technologies have attempted to help IT and Security teams determine and manage which identities should have access to which resources and when. The reality is that these permissions quickly become stale yet are rarely revoked, compounded by the accelerating shift to cloud, explosive data growth, and the everchanging conditions of hybrid and remote work.

Sphere’s unique platform helps some of the world’s largest and most highly regulated organizations with their identity posture. Its customers, which include Goldman Sachs, Northwell Health, and Freddie Mac, typically manage billions of permissions.

We at Forgepoint have been proud to partner with the Sphere team for the past two years, but their journey began over 13 years ago. CEO and Founder Rita Gurevich had experienced firsthand the pain – from managing disparate and outdated systems, to poor data and metadata quality, to complex and manual processes – during her time at Lehman and Barclays. It’s no surprise that when we met Rita, we were impressed by her intelligence, scrappiness, and deep understanding of customer needs.

“SPHERE was born of my recognition that there was an obvious and dire need for an end-to-end access management solution that didn’t previously exist. So, we built a cutting-edge software company that also provides services to solve the critical governance, security, and compliance concerns centered around the expanding access control issues plaguing organizations.” – Rita Gurevich, CEO and Founder

Sphere’s software platform provides end-to-end discovery and visibility across technology assets, actionable intelligence, and ongoing remediation to automate access control within the most complex environments. The ability to protect unstructured data at scale helps customers accelerate their zero-trust initiatives and stay compliant with regulatory requirements. Sphere’s combination of software and tech-enabled managed services provides a rarity for Security and IT teams: peace of mind.

We are delighted to welcome Lenard Marcus and Edison to the board, and wish huge congrats to Rita and the entire team on this major milestone. Sphere has come a long way, but we are most excited about the company’s future in defining Identity Hygiene.