Traceable AI, a company that provides services to protect APIs against cyberattacks, revealed today that it has secured $60 million in a Series B round headed by IVP and including BIG Labs, Unusual Ventures, Tiger Global Management, and numerous unknown angel investors. The additional funds will be used to fund product development, recruiting, and customer acquisition, according to CEO Jyoti Bansal, who is also the co-founder of BIG Labs and Unusual Ventures.
APIs, or application programming interfaces, are used by a large number of businesses to connect computer applications. APIs, on the other hand, are becoming a more prevalent target for hostile hackers due to their ability to enable access to important services and data. API assaults surged approximately 681 per cent between March 2021 and March 2022, according to Salt Labs, the research section of Salt Security (which, granted, offers API cybersecurity solutions). According to Gartner, API abuse will become the leading attack vector for most firms in 2022, with 90 percent of web-enabled apps having more attack surfaces exposed via APIs than user interfaces.
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 (which was bought by Cisco for $3.7 billion) and Harness (which just secured $230 million in a Series D round). Nagaraj, a Harness investor, has been connected to Bansal for a long time, having previously worked at AppDynamics as the VP of software engineering for seven years.
APIs are becoming a vital service component for digital business processes, transactions, and data flows, as enterprises large and small shift from monolithic to highly dispersed cloud-native apps,” Bansal said to TechCrunch in an email interview. Because you can no longer readily buy or recruit security personnel, you must rely on technology to address these flaws.”
Traceable, like a number of its rivals, including Salt, employs artificial intelligence to analyse data to understand regular app behaviour and spot activity that deviates from it. According to Bansal, the startup’s software — which operates on-premises or in the cloud — can catalogue APIs including “shadow” (e.g., undocumented) and “orphaned” (e.g., deprecated) APIs in real-time using a mix of “distributed tracing” and “context-based behavioural analytics.”
Distributed tracing, according to Traceable, is a technology that uses “agent modules” to collect diagnostic data from within production apps as code executes. Context-based behavioural analytics, on the other hand, is concerned with determining how APIs, users, data, and code behave about an organization’s overall risk profile.
With providers like Sequence, 42Crunch, and Noname Security fighting for clients, the API security solutions market is fast getting saturated. The increase is in line with an overall increase in API usage, particularly in the enterprise. According to two research released by API marketplace RapidAPI, 90.5 per cent of developers plan to utilise more or the same amount of APIs in 2022 as they did in 2021, and 98 per cent of company leaders feel APIs are a crucial element of their digital transformation efforts.
