Valence, a cybersecurity startup delivering the first security platform to bring zero trust principles to the Business Application Mesh, announced $7 million in seed funding led by YL Ventures with participation from renowned security executives and serial entrepreneurs. Valence provides comprehensive visibility into the mesh of business application integrations and automated workflows, while identifying and mitigating associated risks and enforcing policy controls.
Valence was founded by experienced cybersecurity professionals and serial entrepreneurs Yoni Shohet, CEO, and Shlomi Matichin, CTO. Industry leaders and security luminaries participated in Valence’s seed round, including Phil Venables, former CISO at Goldman Sachs; Justin Somaini, CSO at Unity Technologies; Karl Mattson, former CISO at PennyMac; Maarten Van Horenbeeck, CISO at Zendesk; Michael Sutton, former CISO at Zscaler; Shay Banon, co-founder and CEO at Elastic, and Benny Schnaider, co-founder and Chairman at Salto.
Today’s hyper-connected organizations operate hundreds of best-of-breed SaaS and self-hosted business applications. Business owners and citizen developers interconnect these applications via direct APIs, SaaS marketplaces and hyperautomation platforms such as Zapier and Workato. This creates the “Business Application Mesh.” While this has many business and productivity benefits, it creates a growing risk surface and a network of indiscriminate and shadow connectivity between applications, potentially leading to supply chain attacks, misconfigurations and data exposure.
The growing number of third-party breaches highlights the inadequacy of current solutions in managing third-party risk. For example, the Mimecast breach, reported earlier this year as part of the SolarWinds attack campaign, saw attackers gain unauthorized access to Microsoft 365 tenants. “Available solutions are limited and do little to increase trust or transparency in how our organizations use third-party vendors,” explained co-investor Sounil Yu, former Chief Security Scientist at Bank of America. “Existing approaches generally perform point-in-time third-party risk assessment or treat business applications in isolation, failing to deliver the continuous visibility and control needed to effectively manage risk while enabling innovation and digital transformation,” he added.
“Too much risk or too much restriction leaves security teams with no good path forward,” says Yoni Shohet, Valence co-founder and CEO. “Our goal at Valence is to allow teams to understand and protect the Business Application Mesh risk surface from risky connections, activities, and third-party access without inhibiting its ability to grow and deliver more business value.”
Valence’s platform is already deployed at select global enterprises which were able to significantly reduce their risk surface with actionable insights. The platform delivers immediate, non-intrusive risk surface management, bringing Business Application Mesh connectivity out of the shadows, providing organizations with a visible map of their app-to-app integrations, and spotlighting risky third-party connections. It continuously alerts on anomalous activities and unauthorized data access across the Business Application Mesh. Allowing security teams to be more preemptive regarding risks, the platform applies zero trust principles and enables enforcement of policies, such as least privilege, significantly reducing the risk surface.
“We’ve heard growing industry concerns related to app-to-app interconnectivity and hyperautomation processes, but we knew that only an all-star team with the right background and talent could both define the problem space and design a revolutionary solution to solve it,” said John Brennan, partner at YL Ventures. “Valence’s security platform illuminates the Business Application Mesh, providing security teams with crucial visibility and the tools required to secure it. When we look at how high the stakes are for businesses due to growing risk surfaces, it’s clear to me that Valence’s platform will quickly become an industry essential.”
