Sqreen, one of the industry’s first providers of application security management (ASM), announced it has raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Greylock Partners with Y Combinator along with previous investors Alven Capital and Point Nine. Including this round, Sqreen has raised more than $18 million in total funding. In conjunction with this funding round, Greylock partner Sarah Guo is joining the board of directors at Sqreen.
The platform offers a modern approach to security in production for web applications and cloud workloads. Essentially, ASM leverages microagents embedded in applications to identify and automatically protect against threats in real-time.
Sqreen can be easily deployed without software code modifications. And Sqreen can be set up to protect any web application in under five minutes. Plus Sqreen’s hybrid SaaS architecture allows instant and safe deployment through smart microagents without having to redirect traffic or installing complex on-premises software.
Launched by former leaders of Apple’s offensive security team Pierre Betouin (CEO) and Jean-Baptiste Aviat (CTO), Sqreen offers a powerful solution to modern application security challenges with the meticulous level of design that their former employer is known for.
“Security is a must-have for SaaS and internet companies and organizations of any size that ship software for their business,” said Pierre Betouin, CEO and co-founder of Sqreen, formerly the leader of Apple’s security Red Team. “Security needs to enable developers and the rest of the company. It can’t be a silo that blocks or slows down releases anymore. We bring true collaboration between the developers and security teams.”
Sqreen is able to go beyond the HTTP layer and use dynamic instrumentation logic for detecting malicious activities within the application. Plus it can provide unprecedented visibility into web application security and risk down to the code level. And dynamic protection modules ranging from runtime application self-protection (RASP) to in-app web application firewall (WAF) and account take-over (ATO) protection can be enabled with one click.
“The state of the art for application security is outdated and complex with approaches that don’t work in production, slow down app development, and are expensive to use and maintain. Today every company is a software company, and Sqreen supports that by putting a scalable security solution in the hands of developers, operations and security teams,” added Greylock partner Sarah Guo. “Just as application performance has become key to every digital business, and APM is embedded in every app that matters, application security will too. Sqreen’s fresh approach is a paradigm shift — a unique platform that eliminates the tradeoff between innovation and security.”
The platform is able to identify suspicious activities and block malicious actors. It is able to protect against common attacks like SQL injections, broken authentication, and cross-site scripting (XSS). It can protect web applications in Ruby, Java, Python, Node.JS, and Go.
Le Monde Group CTO Sacha Morard explained that it has been “wonderful to work with Sqreen because I get accurate insights about attacks that we’re having and it’s very straightforward to see how we can improve our application’s security.”
And Swell Investing CTO Jack Eisenberg pointed out that Sqreen was “easy for developers to integrate and for a security product, they have a very good feel for the user experience – it’s pretty snappy.”
