Amplifier Security: Self-healing security for the workforce

Security is fundamentally about two things: people and technology. Yet the industry has largely built security tools focused solely on the technology element, in spite of the fact that, when it comes to cybersecurity in workplaces, employees are an absolutely essential part of the strategy.

Security teams have to manage an ever-growing number of tools to keep their organization protected. However, they often struggle to adequately address incident alerts and coverage gaps across these tools in a timely manner. The reason? It’s just really tough to get employees, who are busy with their day-to-day work, to pause and fix issues.

Most of the time, people in the workforce aren’t intentionally violating security practices. They’re usually just trying to be as productive as possible and often they feel that security procedures and IT best practices get in their way. Security teams have a hard time solving these last-mile issues because it takes a lot of nuanced, manual effort to loop in employees and get them to fix tooling problems.

That’s why I’m excited that Cota Capital led the new $3.3 million pre-seed funding round in Amplifier, along with Gaurav Manglik at WestWave Capital and Venky Karnam at Shift Left Ventures, and with participation from leading angel investors, including the founders of Slack, MobileIron, Centrify, PeopleNet, SkyFlow, and Mercury.

An workforce-friendly approach to security

I believe Amplifier is the industry’s first AI-powered human-in-the-loop automation and security copilot that connects the dots between an organization’s existing security stack and its people. The AI copilot makes it easier for employees to team up and collaborate with security teams. That way, they can triage and fix issues together, with a self-healing approach, while still maintaining a high level of productivity.

A good example is security patch updates. When security protocols disrupt workflows with forced updates or login requirements—or when alerts go unaddressed due to information overload—coverage gaps emerge. Employees hate it when these updates force a system reboot and disturb their workstream. Security teams do their best to navigate such issues, but the issues can nevertheless lead to a strained relationship between security and the rest of the workforce.

This disconnect between security tools and employee behavior creates a vulnerability that attackers can exploit. Amplifier Security’s focus on employee engagement and AI-powered assistance has the potential to streamline security processes, reduce friction, and ultimately create a more secure work environment. The beauty of Amplifier is that it empowers the entire company to work together toward a much faster response time that dramatically increases the security health and culture of an organization.

Amplifier provides an added layer that connects existing security tools with the workforce through Ampy—a friendly AI buddy that helps employees understand the security risks they might be creating and solves those issues while keeping their productivity in mind. Just as credit card companies verify sketchy transactions with you, Ampy engages with employees to guide them through security protocols based on real-time insights. This approach speeds up response times and massively boosts overall security stance by getting employees directly involved in the security process.

Ampy helps employees understand the risks they may be creating for the organization and solves their security issues in a conversational two-way interaction. Ampy’s interactions can be funny or empathetic and can orchestrate actions across all your tools. Ampy will answer any questions and even celebrate employees when security is improved. Ampy allows security teams to focus on their most valuable work by automating the routine security and operations-related tasks that often consume their valuable time.

A founding team with a unique vision

Another key reason Cota chose to invest in Amplifier is its incredibly strong founding team. Shreyas Sadalgi, the CEO, and Thomas Donnelly, the CTO and president, both have two decades of experience in enterprise security, IT, and automation.

Thomas has a unique background and vision as a three-time CISO and CIO with over a decade spent leveraging human-centric security approaches and has firsthand experience transforming organizational security through technology. His core belief that CISOs need to completely rethink how their teams operate in today’s decentralized workplaces by empowering users to self-heal security issues resonates deeply.

Amplifier has quickly demonstrated product-market fit and has been working closely with security teams at over 15 companies. A lot of them have been using Amplifier’s product in private betas. The product is designed to save hours each week that used to be spent slogging through spreadsheets, allowing customers to quickly identify any gaps in their tooling environments, and self-heal common security issues.

Amplifier addresses a need with its unique human-in-the-loop solution. We believe the company is positioned to turn this trend into a movement that forward-thinking CISOs will embrace, allowing them to manage enterprise security more efficiently and effectively.