Endor Labs emerges from stealth with $25 million to protect software supply chains

Endor Labs officially came out of stealth, launching the company with a Dependency Lifecycle Management Platform that helps development and security teams maximize software reuse by safely evaluating, maintaining, and updating dependencies.

The average enterprise has more than 40,000 open source dependencies directly downloaded by developers. Each of those dependencies can bring in on average 77 other (transitive) dependencies creating a massive, uncontrollable sprawl that slows down development and increases the attack surface across multiple dimensions.

The existing environment doesn’t have adequate solutions to deal with this problem. For example, Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools lack context on how developers are using the dependencies. As a result, they drown developers with endless false positives, and miss the ability to influence better OSS selection, prioritize remediation or detect malicious dependencies.

“Eighty percent of the code in modern applications is code your developers didn’t write but depend on through open source packages. When our founding team was leading the Prisma Cloud engineering group at Palo Alto Networks, we realized the true magnitude of this issue,” said co-founder and CEO Varun Badhwar. “Having previously created the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, this team knows how to take on next generation threats. Our mission now is to enable OSS to live up to its true potential without introducing unnecessary risk. It’s exciting to once again take a new approach to the market, and we believe these solutions will radically enhance application development everywhere.”

Endor Labs’ platform provides security and development teams with an unprecedented understanding of how dependencies are being used across their organization. Furthermore, by performing deep analytics on each OSS dependency, Endor Labs uncovers potential security and operational risks beyond just known vulnerabilities. Endor Labs helps customers select better dependencies; secure, monitor and maintain them at scale; and quickly respond to incidents like Log4j. Having a full understanding of their dependency graph also lets customers generate and analyze accurate SBOMs and have a single source of truth for their entire software inventory.

This lifecycle approach to dependency management means it becomes easier than ever to reuse software across the org. The result is increased productivity for development and security teams, and significantly reduced supply chain risk.

“Dependency Lifecycle Management is going to be absolutely foundational for supply chain and open source security,” said Rachit Lohani, SVP and chief technology officer of Paylocity. “With Dependency Lifecycle Management, Endor Labs is setting an entirely new standard by which organizations can prioritize and zero in on the most significant security and operational issues that have the tendency to slow down application development.”

Funding

The company also announced today that it has raised $25 million in seed financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, and Sierra Ventures, and several industry luminaries who have recognized the massive problem Endor Labs is solving. These include CEOs and executives from Palo Alto Networks, Zoom, Snowflake, Zscaler, Netskope, Rubrik, Databricks, Microsoft, and more.

“Endor Labs serves a critical need — while open source software development continues to grow, the way OSS dependencies and their influence on supply chain risk is managed today hinders development, and leaves both engineering and security teams frustrated,” said Arif Janmohamed, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “They have carved out a market that is both massive and underserved, and have assembled a world-class team to take on this challenge. These are exactly the qualities we seek to add to our portfolio, and we look forward to a long and productive relationship with Endor Labs.”

“This team has a proven track record of being early to identify industry-wide cyber challenges that accompany fundamental big shifts in enterprise technologies,” said Deepak Jeevankumar, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital. “Just as the F500 began migrating to the cloud en masse, Varun co-founded RedLock to build cloud-specific security solutions for them. Now, as the efficiencies of open source software give way to hard to track/manage complexities, Endor Labs is building the platform to secure the code those same businesses depend on. We’re honored with the opportunity to again back Varun along with Dimitri and the team they’ve built.”

Team

A stellar founding team at Endor Labs includes proven builders of businesses with products and technologies that disrupt, from industry leaders like Meta, Uber, Sonatype, Palo Alto Networks, Amazon, Microsoft, and more, with emphasis on security and development. The team includes:

• Varun Badhwar, Founder & CEO: A three-time founder and luminary in the cybersecurity industry, Badhwar most recently was founding GM and SVP of Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, which he built following the acquisition of his previous company, RedLock. Prior to that he founded a CASB company, CipherCloud, and held security practitioner roles at KPMG and Salesforce.
• Dimitri Stiliadis, PhD, Co-Founder & CTO: Leading the vision at Endor Labs, Stiliadis formerly served as Cloud CTO at Palo Alto Networks following the acquisition of his company Aporeto, and prior to that was co-founder and CTO at Nuage Networks, a subsidiary of Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent, and served at Bell Labs Research.
• Georgious Gousious, PhD, Chief Researcher: A well published researcher and expert in the application of advanced program analysis, data science and machine learning techniques for improving developer productivity and operational efficiency, Gousious has received four distinguished paper awards and is the main author of the GHTorrent project that makes GitHub data queryable, among numerous other distinctions.
• Ron Harnik, VP Marketing: An experienced marketing executive and product marketer, Harnik previously served in leadership roles at several startups, including PureSec which was successfully acquired by Palo Alto Networks, where Ron led Product Marketing for the Prisma Cloud business.
• Sriram Subramanian, Head of India R&D center: An engineering leader with over 25 years of experience in building market-leading software products with strong expertise in Cloud, Security and SaaS. Prior to joining Endor, Sriram was VP Engineering at Citrix where he led the 200+ strong Networking Cloud services team in their journey to cloud and SaaS products.

“Software development organizations are struggling with software dependencies, a major threat vector preventing the development and maintenance of secure software, particularly with today’s need for application velocity,” said James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk. “Automated tools are needed to enable teams to work effectively. Endor Labs is designed to automate governance and improve visibility in an era of industrialized software reuse.”

Over the last year, over 75 major organizations have provided feedback that has been incorporated into the product, which is currently in private beta with companies ranging from 200 to 35,000 employees.