Regardless of whether you develop SaaS applications or not, it is likely that you use SaaS applications in your organization. But in the last few years, these helpful services have become a breeding ground for hackers who take advantage of their vulnerabilities to get to you. The Israeli startup Valence Security wants to reduce the chances of your SaaS application being hacked.

Cyber staff aren't the only ones managing applications

Valence’s platform monitors an organization's key SaaS applications to find attacks, suspicious activity, or settings that expose the organization to attacks. The platform includes users, permissions, files, SaaS-to-SaaS connections to third-party products, security settings, and more, and centralizes the entire SaaS application network in one place. This allows them to understand the degree of exposure to attacks. In addition, the system uses automation to help manage and set up SaaS applications and gives recommendations that won’t harm the security of the organization, or its business.

Yes. This solution sounds familiar to us too. Platforms like Torii already offer a suite of tools that not only deal with Security and Compliance but also help manage the entire issue of SaaS and the surrounding licenses. Yoni Shohet, CEO of Valence, explains in a conversation with Geektime that most of the existing solutions focus on the applications and code that the organization itself develops, and neglect the SaaS field: "The organization does not have the ability to manage the code and logic that it runs on these platforms. In contrast to the Software Supply Chain, the SaaS world is managed by the employees in the marketing, sales, IT, human resources, and finance departments, and not just the developers in the organization.”

According to him, "Valence’s solution is the only one that allows security teams to automatically collaborate with employees in the modern distributed organization, where employees have the independence to adopt SaaS applications freely." By doing this, Valence enables the security teams to solve security problems in their SaaS applications in the field of the supply chain, but not only that - it also allows them to solve problems related to identities, data, security settings and more.”

An impressive line of investors

Yesterday (Wednesday) Valence Security announced the completion of a Series A fundraising round of $25 million. In the list of investors, you can find quite a few interesting names; the round was led by Microsoft's M12 fund, and Akamai, with participation from Porsche Ventures, Alumni Ventures, YL Ventures and Michael Fay, who is the former President of Symantec and currently the CEO of Island, the Israeli secure browser startup, which became a unicorn within a year and a half of it was founded. The company's total fundraising now stands at $32 million, and with the new capital, they plan to accelerate its sales in the United States.

Valence Security was founded in 2021 by Yoni Shohet (CEO) and Shlomi Matichin (CTO). Today the company employs about 25 people in Israel.