Valence Security raises $25 million to help organizations prioritize and respond to SaaS mesh risks
Valence Security is announcing its $25 million Series A round led by Microsoft’s M12 venture fund with participation from seed investor YL Ventures and additional investors including Porsche Ventures, Akamai Technologies, Alumni Ventures and Michael Fey, CEO of Island and former president of Symantec.
This new investment round brings Valence’s total funding to $32 million.
The democratization of IT has deeply embedded SaaS applications into every business function within organizations, from sales and marketing to R&D. These SaaS applications empower end users to adopt and interconnect them directly and at scale, evolving into a sprawling and risky SaaS mesh of applications, integrations, users and data. Security teams struggle to gain the required visibility to manage the SaaS mesh risk surface leaving insecure SaaS access and usage, unmanaged shadow identities, ungoverned data sharing and misconfigured third-party integrations, all prime targets for attackers.
Current SaaS security solutions fail to provide security teams with the visibility and business context they need to effectively understand, prioritize and respond to SaaS mesh risks. The Valence Collaborative SaaS Security Remediation platform fills these needs. Valence engages business users to ensure that security decisions are made within the context of business needs and that end users work with and see security teams and processes as business enablers, not impediments. Valence empowers security teams to prioritize SaaS security, configuration and compliance risks, and enables automated and decentralized remediation workflows across the distributed organization.
“We initially launched Valence to address the critical need we saw to harden organizations against the growing risks of SaaS supply chain attacks in a way that takes into account business context and doesn’t impede the velocity of SaaS adoption and usage,” says Yoni Shohet, CEO and co-founder of Valence.
“With the continuous surge in additional SaaS security breaches in 2021, accelerating into 2022 with attacks on inherently secure services such as Okta, Google and GitHub, our commitment to building the first collaborative, automated remediation platform has paid off. Customer response has been overwhelmingly positive and demand for our solution has been strong. As we have expanded our vision to include collaborating with end users to remediate other SaaS risks such as external data sharing and user identities managed outside of the organization’s IdP, our value to our customers as their go-to SaaS security solution has only continued to grow.”
This new approach to collaboratively remediating SaaS risks found a lot of interest in M12. “Recognizing the growing threat of SaaS supply chain attacks, we have been looking closely at startups in this space,” said Mony Hassid, managing director and EMEA lead at M12. “We were impressed with Valence’s approach to identify SaaS security risks, engage the end user to gain business context, achieve business application owner buy-in when remediating SaaS supply chain risks, and address further SaaS risks such as misconfigurations, data protection and identity security.”
“We have been with Valence since the start,” states John Brennan, senior partner at YL Ventures. “The progress the team made in such a short period of time is amazing and we’re excited to continue supporting the team together with great partners like M12. Valence’s Series A round will enable them to further accelerate the growth of their go-to-market team and programs in the U.S. It will also facilitate the rapid expansion of their R&D team to fully realize their vision of enabling organizations to secure their growing mesh of SaaS applications, integrations, user identities and data sharing, without slowing down the fast pace of SaaS adoption, usage and innovation that end users have grown used to.”