Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Application security is seeing the entry of a new startup: Kodem, based in Israel and created by a group of security experts from none other than the NSO Group, aims to identify and reduce risks by utilizing the runtime intelligence of specific apps. It is now coming out of hiding with $25 million.
Both a Series A of $18 million, led by Greylock, and a seed of $7 million, co-led by TPY Capital and Greylock, are included in the funding. Aviv Mussinger, the CEO of Kodem, said the company has been using the money to construct and then deploy its platform internationally. Kodem, a 2021 startup, claimed to have clients in the financial services, insurance, and technology industries.
Application security continues to be one of the more challenging to achieve in the spectrum of enterprise security issues. Regularly utilizing an app runs the danger of exposing a vulnerability in another, in addition to the ever-changing and rotating carousel of services that need to be recognized and tracked. Application management now involves not only human but also policy management.
Ironically, though, that makes it a profitable field as well. Because application security is so complicated, firms generally lack the funds to develop internal management solutions. The market opportunity for application security is predicted to be $9.9 billion this year and increase to over $22 billion by 2020.
After spending years as a security researcher at NSO, the contentious cyber-intelligence company responsible for the Pegasus malware, Mussinger founded Kodem with his co-founders Pavel Furman (CTO) and Idan Bartura (head of engineering).
Given the NSO’s current public image, it is not unexpected that Mussinger speaks of its pedigree with some distance. In his opinion, the parts of NSO and Pegasus that were essentially weaponized by state agencies and others were not directly contributed to by him and his co-founders because they were researchers. And while it provided the three of them with insights that shaped their ideas about what kind of business to start and what problems to address, he claimed that the focus at NSO was not anything similar to what Kodem is attempting to fix.
Kodem’s solution is to evaluate runtime data from programs and run models on it to discover what else is happening concurrently. This data is then combined and sorted, and only the application security warnings that are pertinent to a given organization’s particular stack of apps and services are then generated. Kodem estimates that less than 5% of runtime software is susceptible and that less than 10% of all software is used in runtime. (Note: Since each organization is evaluated, the percentages may vary.) Overall, the method, according to the company, cuts the number of warnings by 95%. Fewer alarms suggest a higher chance that the ones a security team receives are pertinent. In any event, the lighter load indicates that it’s much easier to track the list.
According to Asheem Chandna, Partner at Greylock, “As enterprises continue to move their workloads to the cloud, application security is growing in importance and priority for IT cybersecurity teams.”
The next generation of application security, which is cloud-native, deploys without a hitch and offers the highest levels of accuracy with strong expanding coverage, is being developed by Kodem with the help of an amazing product team.
[Source of Information : Techcrunch.com]
