Traceable AI, a company that provides services to protect APIs (Application Programming Interface) against cyberattacks, revealed today that it had secured a $60 million funding in a Series B round led by IVP, including BIG Labs, Unusual Ventures, Tiger Global Management, and numerous unknown angel investors. The new funds will be used to fund product development, recruitment, and customer acquisition, according to the CEO Jyoti Bansal, the Co-founder of BIG Labs and Unusual Ventures .
APIs/Application Programming Interfaces are used by many businesses to connect applications, and software to render and receive services more efficiently. On the other hand, APIs are becoming a more prevalent target for hostile hackers due to their ability to enable access to essential functions and data of an application. API attacks surged approximately 681% between March 2021 and March 2022, according to Salt Labs , the research section of Salt Security (granted, sells API cybersecurity products). According to Gartner , API abuse will become the leading attack vector for most firms across the globe in 2022, with 90 percent of web-enabled apps having more attack surfaces exposed via the APIs than user interfaces of applications.
Bansal said he spotted the writing on the wall four years ago when he co-founded Traceable with CTO Sanjay Nagaraj in San Francisco. Bansal is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for a whooping $3.7 billion) and Harness (which recently raised $230 million in a Series D funding round). Nagaraj, a Harness investor, has been close to Bansal for a long time, having previously worked at AppDynamics as the VP of software engineering for around seven years.
"APIs are the glue that keeps modern applications and cloud services together. As large and small businesses migrate from monolithic to highly distributed cloud-native applications, APIs are now a critical service component for digital business processes, transactions, and data flows," Bansal quoted in an interview over email. "However, sophisticated API-directed cyber threats and vulnerabilities to sensitive data have also rapidly increased. Businesses need machine learning here. To have zero trust, you need API clarity. You can no longer easily buy or hire security people, so you need to solve these vulnerabilities via technology."
According to Traceable, Distributed tracing is a technology that uses "agent modules" to collect diagnostic data from within the production apps as the code executes. On the other hand, context-based behavioural analytics determines how APIs, users, data, and code behave to an organization's overall risk profile.
Companies that characterize themselves as protecting APIs got $193.4 million in venture capital funding from the late 2019 up until June 2021, according to Crunchbase data, highlighting the possibility and a huge potential that investors see in this area of technology and digital security.
Despite the competition, Traceable has done quite well for itself. Bansal claims that the company has several paying customers and that Traceable has released in public its tracing technology as open-source to encourage a good and broader adoption in the industry. Hypertrace, as the name implies, allows businesses to monitor their applications using technologies similar to the Traceable platform.
Bansal declined to share Traceable's annual recurring income when questioned, he did say that the company's total capital is $80 million, with the majority of that is destined to go toward product development and research.
