How to build a centaur: Semperis hits $100M ARR milestone

Teddie Wardi | January 30, 2025| 3 min. read
Semperis cofounders Guy Teverovsky, Matan Liberman, and Mickey Bresman

Achieving $100m ARR is a significant milestone for a software company — a milestone that very few actually reach. Our portfolio company, Semperis, just announced that they reached this historic mark after wrapping up a very successful 2024. At Insight, we’ve had the privilege of partnering with Mickey and the team at Semperis since our Series B investment in 2020, and we wanted to reflect on their journey to $100M.

What does Semperis do?

Semperis is a hybrid identity protection platform, with a focus on Active Directory (AD). It provides comprehensive protection on-premises, in the cloud, and in hybrid environments from attacks that use identity as a vector. Identity-based attacks continue to be among top concerns for security leaders, with misconfigurations within AD specifically exploiting many cyber attacks. The company also helps customers recover from hybrid AD issues and reduce any potential downtime of customer environments. Semperis protects many of the largest enterprises in the world across critical infrastructure, health systems, and financial and government institutions.

“10-year overnight success”

Semperis was founded in 2015 by Mickey Bresman, Guy Teverosvky, and Matan Liberman. Like many young companies, the startup journey involved near-death moments in the search for product-market fit. Semperis focused more on recovery in its early years, as the founders’ POV about AD presenting significant security risks was not materializing into widely publicized attacks.

However, towards the end of the decade, significant AD-related malware attacks brought the business operations of several notable enterprises to a grinding halt. The NotPetya attack in 2017– which caused an estimated $10 billion in damages — stands out as a compelling event that underscored just how vulnerable enterprise AD environments are, and the potential business disruption of AD going down. It’s well-documented that the global shipping giant Maersk spent more than a week manually recovering their AD.

When we shook hands with Mickey on leading Semperis’ Series B round in March 2020, the company had recently wrapped its 2019 fiscal year ending slightly above $3M ARR, with the majority of the company revenues generated that year.

So, it took Semperis five years to build a product and go from $0 to $3M ARR, and the next five years to go from $3M to $100M. With such impressive growth over the last five years, I thought it’d be helpful to share my thoughts on the main drivers.

Team and culture at the core

When we spent time with the founders towards the end of 2019, we realized two things.

  1. They were incredibly well suited for tackling the problem at hand.
  2. They were creating a great company culture.

The founding team had a background in securing and managing large-scale AD environments and a very good understanding of the potential threat landscape, security gaps, and the status of the legacy tooling in the category. These insights enabled them to build a product that was not only powerful but easy to use for practitioners to keep their critical identity environments safe. This approach also enabled them to surround themselves with team members with unprecedented industry experience around AD, Entra ID, and other enterprise identity systems.

All the Semperians we met seemed to really enjoy working at the company and had quite long average tenures at the business. This continued in the subsequent years, and for many who work with Semperis. Whether in the capacity of a customer, partner, or investor, it is clear that Semperis culture is about achieving great things together, while also being a force for the greater good. Mickey often talks about being a “Force for Good” as the core tenet of the Semperis principles, and how it ties doing good things inside the company as well as in the community together. This approach has been a big foundational block of the company’s success, with incredibly motivated employees, low turnover, and the ability to hire the best talent.

Skating where the puck is going

ScaleUp success is a function of being in the right place but also at the right time. The founding team of Semperis had the foresight of AD and broader the area of Identity Security becoming a top priority for enterprises years ahead of others. This meant Semperis was somewhat ahead of its time, which enabled the team to have an enterprise-ready platform in the market when the demand surfaced. Semperis was able to build a brand as a trusted vendor in the category and have a healthy head start on the competition.

Expanding the platform to match evolving customer needs

There’s a saying that every startup is a point solution in the beginning. This was also true in Semperis’ case with their initial AD recovery-focused product. Since the early days, Semperis has expanded their platform into continuous protection. The deployment model has expanded into cloud and hybrid, and into the Okta ecosystem outside of AD. Semperis has also been a pioneer of the identity threat detection and response (ITDR) Gartner “top trending” category, driving innovation with its attack path analysis, identity runtime protection, and AI-based threat detection capabilities. Semperis has graduated from a point solution into a platform, which has fueled its continued success and ability to become a strategic cybersecurity vendor for large enterprises.

Looking to the future

We are excited for what is ahead for Semperis in 2025. The company’s priorities include building on its innovative concept of the “permissions-defined perimeter,” Active Directory migration and modernization services, and an incident command and control center based on the vast real-world experience the company has gained.