As more businesses move apps and workloads to the cloud, the need for more sophisticated technology to secure that activity grows. That resulted in a strong round of funding for startups that make products to meet that gap. In the latest development, AppOmni-to build a platform not only to connect and secure SaaS apps, but to search, highlight, and help fix vulnerabilities that arise when different The app is used together or simultaneously – has raised $ 70 million. CEO Brendan O’Connor said the funding, a Series C, will be used to continue both for international growth and to continue building the platform.
AppOmni customers include large business and tech names such as Dropbox, Ping, and Accenture as well as large Fortune 100 financial and healthcare companies, which use the platform to secure their SaaS application stacks (AppOmni is integrated with hundreds of SaaS apps including biggies like Box, Confluence, Fastly, GitHub, Google Workspace, Jira, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Workday and Zoom) and also, starting April, any custom app which they make and use along with those.
Thoma Bravo leads this round, with previous backers such as Scale Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, ClearSky, and Costanoa Ventures also investing. The appreciation was not disclosed but as a marker of where it may be present, it has now been raised by $ 123 million; PitchBook said AppOmni was worth $ 200 million post-money in its final round-a $ 40 million Series B in April 2021 that we discussed here-and it has continued to have triple-digit growth since then. Together, it says it now secures apps covering 78 million users and 230 million exposed data records and more than 9 billion monthly events. So even amid the pressures we’ve seen on funding in general, and the competition from other security startups seeking funding, there are signs that AppOmni is among the stronger levels of them.
The security market gap that AppOmni targets has long been critical in some ways to the evolution of IT. As more companies follow the promise of “digital transformation” and embrace making more and more investments in cloud services, they are using a wider range of apps – some of which are “ approved “by IT and some not-accessible to users from a growing number of endpoints (that is, devices, such as laptops, their desks, their phones and tablets, across WiFi at home, public hotspots, mobile networks, office networks, etc. and so on.). That spaghetti of permutations, taken across a wide range of apps, creates a lot of crossover that inadvertently leads to vulnerabilities.
They may be related to specific apps-AppOmni says it typically finds more than 20 unauthorized app uses in a single interaction-or to specific types of data, or records of data. Startups specialize in locating these holes and provide alerts associated with them, as well as begin the remediation process to fix them. It also generates analytics for security operations teams to get more comprehensive pictures of activity across the network to identify trends and manage specific events.
“SaaS has become one of the most important parts of the IT stack. But even though SaaS apps now contain very sensitive data and run some of the most critical business workflows, most organizations don’t SaaS security is adequately prioritized, ”O’Connor said. tayo. “That means there’s a lot of data that’s not secure in the cloud. Our goal is to give businesses and enterprises an easy way to secure their SaaS data and keep it secure over time.”
O’Connor and his co-founder CTO Brian Soby have cut their teeth on exploring cyber risks in cloud services from years of working with SaaS companies themselves, perhaps largely. at Salesforce, where O’Connor became an SVP and “chief trust officer” and Soby became director of product security. That being said, their impact on Salesforce has proven positive, of which Salesforce is now an investor and partner of AppOmni’s. O’Connor continues to work in a similar capacity at ServiceNow, which like other SaaS companies is faced with many of the similar issues of SaaS apps that conflict with each other (even though the it together).
The traction it has has helped the startup stand out from its peers, which include the likes of IBM and Amazon, as well as the F5’s Threat Stack.
“The digitization of businesses in all sectors has accelerated the need for reliable data protection and control, and AppOmni’s security solutions are unmatched in the industry,” added Robert (Tre) Sayle, a partner of Thoma Bravo. “We are impressed with AppOmni’s rapid scaling, high level of customer satisfaction and ongoing product innovation, and we are excited to partner with Brendan and his team as they take advantage of this huge market opportunity in the future.”