AppOmni is a leading provider of SaaS and AI security that secures enterprise applications end to end and prevents breaches by providing clear visibility into security posture, access, third-party connections, AI-related activity, and discovering unsanctioned SaaS and shadow AI tools. Pulse 2.0 interviewed AppOmni CMO Chandra Sekar to learn more.
Chandra Sekar’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Sekar said:
“My background in technology and cybersecurity began with a strong technical foundation. I earned an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, which paved the way for my early career as a Senior Developer at TALX corporation (now Equifax). For six years, I served as Engineering Manager at Eastman Kodak Health Group (now Carestream Health), responsible for developing and delivering high-speed medical image storage and retrieval systems built on a distributed computing platform. This technical experience provided an invaluable understanding that informed my later move into product management and eventually marketing gain. I further honed my strategic and business acumen with an MBA in Marketing and Strategy from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.”
“From there, my career transitioned into product marketing and leadership roles at various high-growth technology companies. I have gained over two decades of experience in go to market roles, serving as a Group Manager of Product Marketing at McAfee, then as Senior Director of Product Marketing at Citrix, and later at Illumio. I was also Vice President of Marketing at Avi Networks (VMware). Most recently, I was the CMO for Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, where I focused extensively on comprehensive cloud security and compliance for cloud resources.”
“All these experiences have led me to my current role as Chief Marketing Officer at AppOmni. I’m passionate about driving innovation, making the customer value clear, creating compelling go-to-market programs, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and helping businesses understand how to navigate and secure the complex digital landscape, particularly in the critical area of cloud, AI, and SaaS security.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Sekar shared:
“The genesis of AppOmni came from a very real and pressing problem identified by our founders, Brendan O’Connor and Brian Soby, during their time working together in security at Salesforce. They witnessed firsthand the immense challenges associated with running mission-critical SaaS applications at scale. What they saw was a growing gap in security: While businesses were rapidly adopting SaaS for core operations, they lacked an effective way to manage and prevent data leaks and misconfigurations within these environments. The two realized that existing security methods were simply not designed for the nuances of SaaS.”
“They founded AppOmni to fill this gap with an enterprise-grade security solution built expressly for these mission critical SaaS business applications. They combined best-in-class security engineering with deep SaaS expertise to provide organizations with immediate visibility into and continuous management of the SaaS estate to dramatically improve their SaaS security posture.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Sekar reflected:
“I enjoy hearing from customers about their cybersecurity challenges and how they’re deploying security solutions to address these challenges. My favorite memory is speaking to an AppOmni customer in the legal industry, who described their strict security needs and how they were performing manual audits of their SaaS applications including Salesforce, M365 and ServiceNow. These audits would take several months and often the application settings would change by the time they completed the audit. With AppOmni, this customer was able to compress their time to audit SaaS applications to just a few hours, gain immediate visibility to risks, and burn down critical issues within a day.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features, and what challenges do you help customers address? Sekar explained:
“AppOmni is the leader in SaaS and AI security, delivering an end-to-end SaaS and AI Security Platform designed to help organizations achieve secure productivity with their SaaS applications. Our platform is built on an agentless architecture that continuously monitors SaaS APIs, configurations, and ingested audit logs. This provides complete data access visibility, secures identities and SaaS-to-SaaS connections, detects threats, prioritizes insights, and simplifies compliance reporting.”
“Key components of our platform include:
“Policy Management: Intuitive tools with a reference policy library and customized risk levels to ensure compliance with frameworks like SOC2 and NIST CSF.
“Threat Detection: Analyzing anomalies and suspicious user behavior, reducing time spent on security data engineering with normalized logs.
“AppOmni Insights: Surfacing data exposures, detecting misconfigurations, and calling out risky SaaS-to-SaaS connections.
“Identity Fabric: Managing identities and privileges to enforce least privilege access.
“SaaS-to-SaaS: Mapping third- and fourth-party SaaS apps connected to the environment, alerting the security team to unauthorized SaaS and securing human and non-human identities that have access to the environment.
“Shadow SaaS and AI Discovery: Uncovering known and unknown applications and connections and exposing unauthorized identities, human and non-human, which may have access to critical data and PII
“Developer Platform: Extending coverage to AI-enabled SaaS and custom applications.
“We address critical customer challenges by preventing data breaches stemming from misconfigurations, over-privileged access, and external threats. We help prevent sophisticated SaaS supply chain attacks, like recent campaigns from UNC6395 and UNC6040, by providing comprehensive visibility into an organization’s interconnected SaaS ecosystem, continuously governing app permissions, and analyzing behavior to detect threats that exploit trusted or rogue SaaS-to-SaaS connections and OAuth tokens. We secure business-critical applications like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, ServiceNow, Workday, and collaboration tools, helping security teams and SaaS application owners protect sensitive data from attackers and insider threats. Our offensive security research team has identified security risks in major SaaS platforms and provided insights to customers and SaaS vendors before those risks were exploited. We find the kinds of SaaS security risks that often lead to breaches, highlight what needs attention first, and provide clear, step-by-step actions for remediation.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Sekar noted:
“Our technology is always evolving to keep pace with the dynamic changes in enterprise SaaS adoption. Initially, AppOmni focused on solving the critical problem of cloud data exposure visibility and security for enterprises grappling with the proliferation of SaaS applications. The core challenge then was that businesses’ use of SaaS had outpaced their understanding of security controls, leaving private data accidentally exposed.”
“We’ve expanded from providing preventative security posture and policy management controls to providing a holistic platform which addresses shadow SaaS and AI discovery, detecting risky and anomalous behaviors and advanced threats, unauthorized third party connections, and integrating into standard security workflows. Our platform ensures secure productivity across the entire SaaS estate with hundreds of SaaS apps.”
“A pivotal evolution is our pioneering efforts in securing AI, including AI embedded within SaaS applications as well as standalone AI agents. We help organizations adopt AI confidently, enforcing least privilege and zero trust from day one. AppOmni also uses AI in our solutions: We combine AI-driven automation with telemetry from billions of SaaS events to provide intelligent threat detection and faster, more effective security insights across large scale SaaS deployments. We created the first AI-powered SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) assistant, AskOmni, enabling administrators to ask their way to securing their SaaS estate. And we developed the world’s first SaaS security Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for agentic AI architectures, with deep insights into SaaS identities, security posture, data exposures, and user behaviors for unparalleled threat investigations and analysis across the SaaS domain using agentic AI.”
“Recent AppOmni advances include expanded and powerful identity-centric analysis, mass-scale event monitoring and threat detection capabilities. We became the first and only pure-play SaaS security company to be granted Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO), marking a significant milestone towards full authorization and enabling us to support federal agencies with the highest security standards. Everything we do is driven by our commitment to staying ahead of emerging SaaS threats.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Sekar cited:
“AppOmni has demonstrated strong momentum with a 43% year-over-year revenue spike. Our customer base has expanded to include some of the largest global enterprises across industries, validating our unique approach.”
“We released Zero Trust Posture Management (ZTPM), a solution set that dramatically strengthens security by bridging gaps in network-centric Zero Trust architectures. ZTPM provides unprecedented visibility into configuration, security posture, and user behaviors, enabling granular access and configuration management across the SaaS landscape from a single pane of glass. We also led the industry by delivering the first SaaS security compliance checks for CISA Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 25-01 and another industry-first: Real-time agentic AI security for ServiceNow with AppOmni AgentGuard to prevent prompt-injection attacks, monitor and blocks data loss prevention violations, and quarantine malicious users from further bad interactions for ServiceNow’s Now Assist AI agents.”
“We expanded our capabilities by acquiring Omniscreen, enhancing our discovery and posture management features. Our partnerships have also been crucial, including a significant collaboration with KPMG Canada and an ongoing partnership with Protiviti to assess and operationalize SaaS security programs. And we partnered with Cisco to combine our ZTPM solution with Cisco’s Security Service Edge (SSE) technology suite, enabling zero trust principles at the application layer in SaaS applications.”
“Our commitment to deep security research is another hallmark – we released the third iteration of our annual State of SaaS Security Report last year, which found 1/3 of companies suffered a data breach during the previous 12 months. And our AO Labs SaaS security research team continuously uncovers critical data exposure issues in widely used platforms like Salesforce, Microsoft Power Pages, ServiceNow, including the platform’s GenAI suite and the most severe AI-driven vulnerability uncovered to date, and Oracle NetSuite SuiteCommerce, as well as the Ireland national Health Service Executive’s COVID Vaccination Portal, further helping organizations secure their SaaS environments.”
“We regularly collaborate with industry bodies to improve SaaS security. AppOmni was a lead author in the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) SaaS Security Capability Framework, or SSCF, the first SaaS security guidance framework.
“And we’ve been honored to receive notable industry accolades, including the 2024 CRN Stellar Startup in Security Award, being recognized as a Leader and Fast Mover in GigaOm’s inaugural Radar Report for SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM), recognition from Frost & Sullivan: Growth and Innovation Leader in the 2025 Frost Radar for SaaS Security Posture Management, and Tech Innovation Leader, and achieving Great Place to Work certification.”
Customer Success Stories
Can you share any specific customer success stories? Sekar highlighted:
“We pride ourselves on helping a diverse range of organizations strengthen their SaaS security posture and protect their critical data. We worked with Rightmove, the UK’s number one property website, to ensure the security of their vast amount of sensitive data within their Salesforce environment. We provided the University of Cincinnati with enhanced visibility and control over their SaaS applications to safeguard student and faculty data. And DLA Piper, a global law firm, implemented AppOmni to secure their SaaS ecosystem against potential data leaks and misconfigurations, paramount in the data-sensitive industry.”
Funding/Revenue
How much funding have you raised to date? Sekar revealed:
“AppOmni has raised $123 million in total funding to date, with our latest round Series C. We’re fortunate to have the backing of leading investors, including Thoma Bravo, Scale Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, ClearSky, Costanoa Ventures, Inner Loop Capital, Silicon Valley Data Capital, ServiceNow Ventures, and Twilio’s COO, George Hu.”
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Sekar assessed:
“We’re leading the rapidly expanding SaaS security market, projected to reach $12 billion in 2025. This significant market size underscores the critical and growing need for specialized SaaS security solutions as organizations increasingly rely on these applications for their core operations.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Sekar affirmed:
“Unlike tools that have surface-level checks on SaaS applications, AppOmni provides complete, centralized, and dramatically deeper posture checks and visibility across the entire SaaS environment. This includes detailed insights into configuration settings, SaaS-to-SaaS connections, and actions by human and non-human identities including anomalous behavior. We boast the largest dataset in the industry gained by processing billions of events every day, ensuring customers are always up to date with every new security feature and SaaS vendor update. We developed an industry-first, open source, SaaS Event Maturity Matrix (EMM) – a SaaS auditing and threat detection framework for assessing SaaS event logging from different SaaS platforms, enabling cybersecurity teams to organize and catalog audit logging capabilities and gain improved SaaS threat detection efficacy.”
“Our unmatched depth of capabilities spans data exposure alerting and prevention, robust data access management, comprehensive configuration monitoring, and dozens of easy-to-use reports for compliance. AppOmni focuses exclusively on SaaS security, giving us specialized domain knowledge and expertise that others can’t match. This deep expertise, combined with our vast and growing base of enterprise customers helps us protect over 101 million users, more than 260 million exposed data records, and analyze 60 billion cyber events each month, demonstrating our proven effectiveness and scale.”
AI Changing Outlook For Cybersecurity
How is AI changing the outlook for cybersecurity and how are you using AI effectively? Sekar pointed out:
“AI is no longer optional in cybersecurity; it’s the only way to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape. The sheer volume and sophistication of cyber threats, especially in complex SaaS environments, make manual detection and response unsustainable. AI provides the necessary speed, scale, and intelligence to analyze vast amounts of data, identify anomalies, and predict potential attacks.”
“At AppOmni, we’re leveraging AI to fundamentally improve SaaS security. Our platform uses AI to continuously uncover risks, deliver insights on security policies, and guide customers through step-by-step remediation actions across their most critical SaaS applications. This includes analyzing anomalies and suspicious user behavior and reducing the time security teams spend on data engineering by normalizing logs for seamless integration into SIEM and SOAR systems. We’re also focused on securing AI itself, by discovering Shadow AI and posture controls. And our customers get access to our GenAI SaaS security companion, AskOmni, which simplifies security tasks with AI-powered prompts.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Sekar emphasized:
“Our future goals are centered on continuing to be the unparalleled leader in securing the applications that power businesses of all sizes, from small enterprises to large corporations and government agencies. This means consistently delivering leading powerful security research and innovations against an ever changing landscape of AI-enabled SaaS apps. AppOmni views the problem of security AI and SaaS as two sides of the same coin. A key focus moving forward is ensuring organizations can effectively protect AI, including the AI capabilities increasingly embedded within SaaS applications. Recent high-profile SaaS attacks prove that SaaS continues to be an attractive target for threat actors and our platform will continue to evolve with the threat landscape.”
Industry Viewpoints
Any other industry viewpoints would you like to share? Sekar concluded:
“With the rapid adoption of cloud and SaaS platforms, these applications have become the backbone of modern operations, offering immense benefits in scalability and accessibility. However, this shift has also created a significant challenge: Organizations have often outpaced their ability to establish robust security configurations and trust mechanisms. Many businesses simply lack visibility into how their SaaS applications manage security.”
“Traditional network level controls offered by Secure Services Edge (SSE) solutions and other “castle and moat” security models are obsolete. With remote work and heavy SaaS usage, the attack surface has drastically expanded, and existing security tools often lack the visibility needed. Attackers are exploiting this shift, targeting SaaS tenants through techniques like phishing, OAuth token abuse, credential stuffing, and exploiting misconfigurations for data theft.”
“This underscores the critical need for a strategic overhaul. SaaS security cannot be effectively tackled manually, application by application. We need comprehensive technology that provides the visibility, continuous monitoring, and control essential to mitigate SaaS security risks efficiently and at scale. This is the core of AppOmni’s mission. But it’s also vital to recognize that SaaS security isn’t just about deploying tools; it’s a fundamental shift in security thinking. It requires a collective responsibility and collaboration between application owners and security teams, acknowledging the shared responsibility model inherent in cloud security. Building a robust SaaS security program, underpinned by education, awareness, and cross-functional collaboration is no longer optional. A secure, SaaS-first digital future is within reach, but it requires us to make SaaS security a cornerstone of our digital transformation strategies, not an afterthought.”
