- Traceable — the world’s first end-to-end application security monitoring platform — recently launched from stealth with $20 million in funding
Traceable — the world’s first end-to-end application security monitoring platform — recently launched from stealth with $20 million in series A funding from Unusual Ventures and BIG Labs.
Jyoti Bansal, the founder and former CEO of AppDynamics, heads Traceable as CEO and co-founder. Bansal is known for selling AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in January 2017. And Traceable had spun out of BIG Labs, which is Bansal’s startup studio.
Sanjay Nagaraj, former VP of Engineering at AppDynamics, serves as CTO and co-founder of Traceable. Before AppDynamics, Nagaraj worked as head of engineering at emFAST and principal software engineer at Optus Software.
As businesses of all sizes are migrating from monolithic to highly distributed cloud-native applications (often built with hundreds or even thousands of microservices), protecting cloud-native applications from cyberattacks has become one of the biggest challenges for this new architecture. And microservice APIs often expose business logic that threat actors use to infiltrate applications and private data.
Bansal and Nagaraj had seen the massive adoption of cloud-native architectures firsthand while working with thousands of AppDynamics customers. And at the same time, high profile businesses like Uber and Facebook were making news as they became victims of new business logic attacks due to vulnerabilities in microservice APIs. With cloud-native architecture adoption surging, Bansal and Nagaraj launched Traceable to protect applications from next-generation attacks.
Traceable — which leverages the team’s expertise in distributed tracing and observability — is the only Application Security Platform that traces end-to-end application activity from the user and session all the way through the application code. And TraceAI, the platform’s machine learning technology, analyzes the data to learn normal application behavior and to detect activity that deviates from the norm. Customers tap into Traceable’s rich forensic data and insights to easily analyze attack attempts and perform root cause analysis.
Bansal and Nagaraj made Traceable’s underlying distributed tracing platform available as an open-source project called Hypertrace. And by deploying Hypertrace, DevOps teams observe and monitor production applications with the same comprehensive distributed tracing and observability capabilities powering Traceable.
Key Quotes:
“It became clear to us that a drastically new approach to application security was needed to protect businesses as they deploy their applications in cloud-native architectures. Existing solutions were designed to protect traditional monolithic web apps with well-understood protocols. They aren’t capable of understanding distributed applications using thousands of custom APIs.”
— Jyoti Bansal
“While we were building Traceable, we realized that every business and every application should have access to a robust distributed tracing system. Highly distributed cloud-native applications are almost impossible to operate and troubleshoot without distributed tracing. So we decided to make this core part of our platform, open source and freely available. We hope the community not only adopts Hypertrace but feels empowered to contribute to the project to make it even better.”
— Sanjay Nagaraj
“The broad use of APIs in cloud-native applications has greatly expanded the attack surface for enterprises, and until now, there hasn’t been a solution that adequately addresses this growing issue. Traceable solves one of the biggest problem security teams face, which is distinguishing between valid and malicious use of an application’s APIs.”
— Gerhard Eschelbeck, former Google CISO and Traceable advisor
“At Houwzer, we conduct hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate transactions every year. Our customers place their trust in us to keep their information safe, so we need the best tools at our disposal to do so. Traceable’s technology enables my team to understand exactly how our APIs function in order to best diagnose and resolve issues when they arise, ensuring all the sensitive information we house is secure even as our application changes and new types of attacks emerge. This visibility also allows us to orient our product roadmap and optimize for success.”
— Gregory Phillips, CTO of Houwzer (an early Traceable customer).
