Zenity – a leader in securing enterprise copilots and low-code development – announced a strategic investment led by Microsoft’s venture fund M12.
As enterprises rush to adopt enterprise copilots and low-code development platforms like Microsoft’s own offerings of Microsoft Copilot, Power Platform, Copilot Studio, and Fabric, business users are, for the first time, at the forefront of and in control of business application development.
This market shift in enterprise means that most application development is happening outside of IT, meaning applications are being developed without traditional safeguards; namely IT involvement, software development lifecycle (SDLC), CI/CD security tooling, and traditional AppSec tools that rely on code scanning to spot vulnerabilities. This leads to a large wave of Shadow Application Development.
Zenity researchers have found as high as 79,000 applications being developed per organization using copilots and low-code platforms. And this research further found that a large percentage of these applications contain serious security vulnerabilities whether it is hard-coded secrets, untrusted guests gaining privileged access to critical assets, over-exposing bots to the public internet, or apps and copilots with poorly configured authentication mechanisms.
Zenity was launched in 2021 to bring application security controls to business-led development happening across these enterprise copilots and low-code development platforms. And Zenity currently helps many Fortune 500 enterprises to understand what business users are building across their copilot and low-code estate, identifying security vulnerabilities and development and runtime, and help automatically remediate critical findings at scale.
KEY QUOTES:
“We are excited to be partnering with M12 to continue our mission of helping enterprises securely unleash the use of AI copilots and low-code development. Partnering with Microsoft is a strategic move for Zenity as Microsoft’s global reach, robust technology stack, and commitment to innovation align perfectly with our vision. This investment allows us to leverage Microsoft’s resources to accelerate our growth and work closely on a joint go-to-market strategy, enhancing the security and success of our mutual customers.”
- Ben Kliger, Zenity CEO and co-founder
“M12 is committed to driving innovation, particularly through AI and low-code development, which are key to enhancing innovation, productivity, and efficiency. Our investment in Zenity underscores the urgent need for security solutions as enterprise users increasingly utilize developer-level capabilities to process data at AI speeds, without existing safeguards for app security. Witnessing Zenity’s impact within Microsoft firsthand showcased the substantial benefits it provides to its customers, solidifying our decision to deepen our partnership with Zenity. This collaboration is pivotal as enterprises strive to securely leverage enterprise copilots and low-code/no-code platforms.”
- Jason McBride, Investment Partner at M12
