2 min Security

Elastic acquires build.security to gain authorization policy management capabilities

Elastic acquires build.security to gain authorization policy management capabilities

Less than a year after it raised $6 million on seed funding, build.security is being acquired by Elastic. The Tel-Aviv and Sunnyvale-based startup did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. The deal will close in Elastic’s second quarter (FY22), ending October 31, 2021.

Ash Kulkarni, chief product officer at Elastic, sent an email to TechCrunch saying that once the acquisition is done, the build.security technical team will continue as a unit in the Elastic company.

Kulkarni added that the acquisition will also form the foundation for Elastic’s presence in Israel, with Amit Kanfer, the co-founder and CEO of build.security, slated to be the site lead for the region.

A good fit

Kulkarni noted that security policy technology complements Elastic’s efforts to enhance security and observability. He added that Elastic sees potential for using OPA and the technology that build.security has built on top of OPA to power deployment time and hopefully build-time security for cloud-native environments in the future.

Joel Brennan, YL Venture partner and the man who helped lead the seed round for build-security, views the acquisition as a good fit for both entities, as they are in the business of creating solutions for developers, based on open-source tech.

Elastic’s security ambitions

Brennan added that the move by an industry leader like Elastic validated the efforts of those in the authorization business.

The partnership, he added, will accelerate build.security’s shift-left vision to enable the efficient embedding of access protection from the beginning, rather than trying to add it after the fact or ignoring it altogether.

Elastic is known for its Elastic Stack, which power Elasticsearch, Logstash log monitoring, and Kibana data visualization. In recent years, the company has forayed into security, acquiring Endgame Security for $234 million in 2019, among other moves to solidify its foothold in the space.