Salt Security, the leading Application Programming Interface (API) security company, last Thursday (Feb. 10th) announced that it raised $140 million in Series D funding, led by CapitalG (Alphabet’s independent growth fund), with participation from all existing investors such as Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, Tenaya Capital, S Capital VC, Advent International, Alkeon Capital, and DFJ Growth.
AI and APIs
With the digital transformation, there has been a rapid growth in the production of APIs as they are essential to enabling business innovation; APIs provide the foundation for innovation in today’s economy. However, with this growth comes unprecedented API security threats both in scope and scale. Unfortunately, the traditional tools that have been used to defend against API attacks in the past, such as firewalls and API gateways, are not adequately protecting them today. This leaves the wider business community open to API vulnerabilities and attacks. So much so, that in the first half of 2021, the amount of malicious API traffic grew more than 340%.
With the need for API protection surging, Salt Security built a platform to do just that. Salt’s robust security solution leverages cloud-scale big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, so it can effectively detect and stop attacks, fast. Salt’s platform learns the granular behaviour of a company’s APIs and requires no configuration or customization to pinpoint and block API attackers. Their platform is the single ML-based API solution with a patent on the market. With APIs at the core of every modern application, Salt is making it safer and easier for companies to keep innovating, securely.
This investment round comes only 8 months after their Series C round, in which they raised a total of $70 million. This capital from the current round will go toward expanding R&D, sales and marketing, and its international operations, so they can continue to address the growing number of cyber threats targeting APIs.
Impressive growth
The latest investment brings the valuation of Salt Security to $1.4 billion, adding it to the list of Israeli unicorns. Salt has had the most funding, highest valuation, most customers, and deepest penetration among Fortune and Global 500 enterprises of any other API security platform. In the last 12 months alone, they have raised $210 million and have seen a 500% growth in revenue, 300% growth in its customer base, 250% growth in its employee count and 900% growth in signed customers among Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies. They have also appointed Kfir Lippmann, who led finances at Monday.com from its early days through to its IPO, to the company's CFO.
Salt Security was founded in 2016 by Roey Eliyahu (CEO) and Michael Nicosia (COO). The company has raised a total of $271 million to date and is based both in Israel and Silicon Valley.
