Today (Tuesday), Israeli cyber startup apiiro, which enables organizations to accelerate application and infrastructure delivery, emerges from stealth mode with a $35 million funding round. The investment was led by Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins.
Connecting DevSecOps teams
apiiro’s system connects developers, security and compliance teams in order to accelerate the software development process in an organization and reduce the risk involved. The automated platform does this in 3 stages: at first, the platform stocks an organization’s applications and code components; next, the system recognizes significant changes that have been made and their business risk; and finally, the system utilizes automation to reduce the risk from the changed pieces of code.
CEO and founder Idan Plotnik tells Geektime that what makes apiiro’s tech stand out from competitors is the fact that its system automates learning of a developers’ behavior and knowledge. The company also filed a patent on a never before used technique of analyzing code history to better understand their background and their potential risk rate. “Then the platform connects the business risks to the changes in applications or cloud infrastructure and significantly reduces them automatically,” adds Plotnik. According to Plotnik, COVID only helped enhance the DevSecOps problem, which apiiro aims to remedy. Nevertheless, he claims that due to the company’s product, many large enterprises were successful in accelerating software development and reducing the threat factors.
Plotnik, who previously founded and sold Aorato to Microsoft for $200 million, tells that while working for Microsoft he understood the importance of the transition to cloud-native de elopement. “This is a technological and cultural shift, where there are no limits between an application and the infrastructure. It’s all about the code, and the responsibility falls on the developers’ shoulders,” explains Plotnik.
apiiro claims that this change creates one of the more complex issues facing DevSecOps teams these days - how to push code without compromising on security control and the risk analyzing process. Based on company reports, its proprietary platform solves exactly these problems by facilitating a connection between the development teams and the security and compliance wizards.
apiiro was founded in 2019 by Idan Plotnik and Yonatan Adler, who was also part of Aorato. The company employs a team of around 25 split between its Israeli R&D center and NY offices. The company further reports that it has already secured paying customers, and its platform is currently being used by two of the biggest banks in the world. apiiro is planning on using the newly acquired funds to recruit talent to its R&D team, and expand marketing and sales efforts.
"Having overseen cybersecurity at one of the biggest financial services institutions in the world, the DevSecOps problem is still very real. There is a call for DevOps, security and risk management teams to collaborate, but without a technology like apiiro this type of learned risk is impossible," said Charles Blauner, apiiro Advisor and former Global CISO of Citi Group. "Industries, like financial services, are prime for this type of technology as the application delivery pressure is palpable as various stakeholders are constantly pushing out new features."
