Sweet Security, a Tel Aviv-based cloud security startup, today announced that it has raised a $12 million seed round led by Glilot Capital Partners, with participation from CyberArk Ventures and a number of angel investors including Gerhard Eschelbeck, a former CISO at Google and Travis McPeak, who led product security at Databricks.

Sweet provides businesses with a real-time cloud-native security suite that aims to help security teams quickly stop attacks on cloud workloads. The company was co-founded by a number of security veterans: Dror Kashit, the former CISO of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Eyal Fisher, the former head of the Cyber Department at the IDF's Unit 8200, and Orel Ben-Ishay, the former head of cybersecurity at the IDF's R&D group Unit 81.

Image Credits: Sweet Security

Kashit noted that toward the end of his time in the IDF, the Israeli government and military prepared for Project Numbus, the cloud computing project that looked into how Israel could move its sensitive workloads securely into the cloud (a project, we should note, that wasn't uncontroversial).

"I needed to sign the security paragraph of this project," Kashit said. "As a CISO, you don't have any insurance policy. You need to manage your risk. [...] But I couldn't find any good tools for detect and response in real time in the cloud. I looked for half a year and I couldn't find anything." So when he retired from the IDF, he called up Fisher and the two decided to team up to solve this problem.

One of the core technologies that Sweet is basing its solution on is eBPF, which allows sanboxed programs to run in the Linux kernel, where they can collect metrics about network traffic and resource usage without creating a lot of overhead. While the concept has been around for almost ten years, it's only become somewhat mainstream in the last few years, in part because it makes monitoring cloud-native infrastructure a lot easier.