Atmosec Raises $ 6 Million to Combat SaaS Security Threats

Atmosec, a SaaS security firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, announced today that it has exited stealth mode and raised $ 6 million in a seed funding round. Atmosec says its solution tackles the rapidly increasing SaaS threats in today’s hyper-connected ecosystem and provides precise anomaly detection and mitigation without compromising business continuity.

In an article published by McKinsey, industry analysts estimate that the SaaS market will grow by more than 20% per year, reaching nearly $ 200 billion by 2024 and accounting for about a third of the total software market. business. Atmosec Co-Founder and CEO Aner Gelman told VentureBeat via email that Atmosec’s platform addresses SaaS security issues by using machine learning (ML) to define the behavior of each SaaS service. and its integrations, thus identifying anomalies in this behavior.

While the SaaS explosion is bringing more speed, agility and scalability to businesses, it also brings security concerns, according to Gartner. Atmosec says its mission is to help businesses of all sizes overcome emerging security challenges by better understanding the behavior of third-party services.

Behavior tracking through contextual analysis

Atmosec noted that while connecting third-party services such as Slack, Dropbox, Google Workplace, ServiceNow and others becomes increasingly essential to business growth, they come with new threats that bad actors can. to exploit.

For many organizations, monitoring new software, assessing the risk of new connections, and managing their cybersecurity posture is impractical, according to the company.

Atmosec claims that its platform uses contextual analysis to monitor and understand applications from a behavioral perspective, while enabling rapid detection of anomalies that can be addressed quickly by organizations.

“Cloud-native businesses and those transitioning to the cloud are looking to increase their visibility and show that they are in control of their growing SaaS ecosystem,” Gelman said in a written statement.

Kobi Samboursky, Founder and Managing Partner of Glilot Capital Partners, said Glilot Capital recognizes a growing trend among security professionals to prioritize SaaS security solutions. Samboursky noted that Atmosec’s solution bridges the gap by securing the burgeoning SaaS ecosystem.

Solve the complexity of SaaS security in three key areas

According to Hacker News, the main weak points in SaaS security come from lack of visibility, lack of control, lack of governance in the lifecycle of SaaS applications, lack of skills and an overwhelming workload. Atmosec says its platform will solve the problem of SaaS security complexity for customers in these three key areas:

• Visibility: help customers understand the scope of services across their SaaS ecosystem and their interactions with each other.
• Protection: ensure that one compromised SaaS solution does not compromise the others.
• Prevention: limit the potential breach of SaaS services by monitoring API tokens. The company says its proactive approach to security reduces the attack surface of every SaaS application, including sending alerts about unused token privileges, removing unused tokens, and monitoring and advising on configuration changes.

Adi Dangot Zukovsky of Battery Ventures noted that businesses today rely on the ever-growing number of SaaS applications to effectively run their businesses. However, Zukovsky said, it is alarming that many organizations have inadequate systems to manage third-party risk.

“Atmosec is addressing this critical issue with new technology that gives cloud-native businesses greater visibility into their existing systems and helps them reduce the risk of third parties exploiting their third-party business applications and connectivity paths. application to application, ”he added. .

As Atmosec faces stiff competition in managing SaaS applications and security startups AppOmni and Obsidian, the company says it places less emphasis on the growing SaaS ecosystem and its interconnectivity. “Atmosec takes a different approach, focusing on SaaS connections and their underlying behavior in addition to individual SaaS services. We have the unique ability to consider the real behavior of SaaS platforms, which is not the focus of conversations today, ”said Gelaman.

Expanding SaaS Security Capabilities and Features

Gelman said this additional capital will allow Atmosec to build a multidimensional team to further push the limits of their product’s ML capabilities. Atmosec will start exploring a few ideas around the second half of 2022, according to Gelman.

Atmosec plans to drive growth by adding dozens of new roles, particularly in its R&D and sales and marketing teams, over the next six months. The company currently employs 20 people and has raised a total of $ 6 million to date.

This funding round was led by Glilot Capital Partners and Battery Ventures, with additional participation from the co-founders of Armis, Wiz and Talon Cyber.