Israeli startups

Applications security startup Apiiro pulls in $100M Series B from A-list investors • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Apiiro, applications security, General Catalyst, Israeli startups, Security, StartupsNo Comments

At a time when large rounds are a thing of the past, especially in the early stages, Apiiro, an applications security startup, announced a $100 million Series B today from several top shelf Silicon Valley firms. What is attracting this kind of investment in a time when investors otherwise are in a period of belt tightening? The company is working to help developers and security operations find and solve issues that could result in vulnerabilities, and do so in a proactive manner, says company co-founder and CEO Idan Plotnik. “Developers and application security engineers today are literally overwhelmed with siloed tools, manual risk assessment processes and too many alerts with false positives without any context. Apiiro helps developers and application security engineers to proactively fix the most critical risks to the business with actionable context using one solution,” he explained. Unlike similar tools, Apiiro isn’t just checking the CI/CD pipeline or production for vulnerabilities, it starts at the design phase. “Before you start to code, at the design phase when you just create a user story with a new feature request, we analyze the text and raise a flag when a potential risky feature is requested,” he said. Beyond that, the company is aiming to be a set of guard rails for the development team as the application moves through design, building and production. What’s more, Plotnik says, it is not simply about pointing out potential vulnerabilities like Log4j, it’s finding the ones that could matter most to the team. That can help cut down on the noise and limit the number of fixes. “Let’s say in my code base that I have 5000 Log4j instances with a CVSS score (risk assessment score) of 10, but in your runtime you have only 100 of them and only 50 of them are actually exposed to the internet in a high business impact application. This is why we’re looking at context… to make sure developers fix only the most critical risks, ones that attackers can actually exploit,” Plotnik said. Quentin Clark, managing director at lead investor, General Catalyst, says that his firm invested this kind of money because security is a category that’s constantly changing and they saw a lot of potential here. “Security is one of these areas where you have to sort of rebuild the tooling to keep up with the changes in the development and operating platforms. So as the environment in which applications are being built changes so too must security tools, and so there’s an opportunity to go build a big important company here,” Clark told ZebethMedia. It probably doesn’t hurt that Plotnik reports that the company grew ARR 400% in the third quarter. The startup is up to 90 employees and it will be doubling in the coming year with the help of this substantial investment. He says that building a diverse workforce is one of the company’s five core values, and as he scales the company up, he is trying to adhere to that. “We proactively hire women, and we are also trying to train people to get into the software engineering and cybersecurity space [to expand the available pool of underrepresented applicants],” he said. Today’s $100 million round was led by General Catalyst with participation by Greylock and Kleiner Perkins. The company did not share the valuation. The total raised so far is $135 million, per Crunchbase. It’s worth noting that in September, Israeli business publication Globes, was reporting rumors that Palo Alto Networks was interested in buying the company for around $550 million. Last month Jewish Business News reported that the talks had broken down and the company was looking for additional funding.

Port internal development platform gives visibility into DevOps architecture • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in devops, Enterprise, Israeli startups, portNo Comments

In a typical large organization DevOps tasks have become so complex, and involve navigating so many tools, it has become difficult to understand the current state of affairs, and to add resources when needed. It’s gotten to the point where developers often need to submit a ticket, even for a routine operation, which is adding unnecessary friction and slowing down the entire process. Port, an early stage Israeli startup, wants to help by offering a portal of sorts where DevOps engineers can get visibility into the current state of the architecture, while deploying new resources when needed, all from a single window. Traditionally, this kind of functionality was only available to large engineering organizations like Netflix, Spotify and Lyft. Today, Port announced a $7 million seed investment to bring it to the masses. The startup has created what is called an ‘internal development platform’ with the goal of letting both developers and operations get more work done without filing tickets, says Zohar Einy, company co-founder and CEO. “We’ve built this internal development platform that essentially allows engineering to access a single interface that acts as a single pane of glass [for all DevOps information],” Einy said This actually is highly customizable and Port provides the building blocks to create a portal that makes most sense to the customer and their way of working, a lot like the portal building tools from the past, but geared specifically towards DevOps. “We took a builder-based approach that gives them a very simple tool set to build their internal platform with [low] code components that we provide them,” he said. Ultimately they can do two main things, no matter how they build it. “The first layer is the ability provides engineering with good visibility into DevOps. They can define the software catalog with all the data that engineering cares about regarding microservices, environments, cloud resources, permissions and things like that,” he said. The second piece lets them self-provision components like creating an environment or setting up a microservice. He says all of this is designed with the goal of cutting down the number of help tickets filed between developers and operations to keep development flowing more smoothly. The company just launched a year ago, but they have paying customers using the product in a proof of concept scenario. With 22 employees already, Einy says that diversity is a big priority for the company. He says to that end, they have been working with NGOs, a common method for hiring underrepresented people in Israel where the company is based. Roni Floman, who runs marketing for Port says the NGOs help the company find people from communities in Israel, who might not otherwise apply at a startup like Port. “Israel has some NGOs dealing with adding Orthodox, very religious people, or people from Israel’s Arab community and usually those NGOs help place people [from these communities] in companies because in many cases, these people don’t usually just apply for a job [at a company like this],” she explained. “[Our] plan is to connect and proactively reach out to be able to hire those people and create a more diverse workforce.” Today’s $7 million seed round was led by TLV Partners with participation from some prominent industry angels.