In 2017, Jyoti Bansal co-founded San Francisco-based security company Traceable alongside Sanjay Nagaraj, a former investor. With Traceable, Bansal – who previously co-launched application performance management startup AppDynamics, acquired by Cisco in 2017 – sought to create a platform to protect customer APIs against cyberattacks.
Attacks against APIs – the sets of protocols that establish how platforms, applications and services communicate – are on the rise. API attacks affected nearly a quarter of organizations every week in the first month of 2024, an increase of 20% compared to the same period last year, according to cybersecurity firm Check Point.
API attacks take many forms, including attempting to make an API unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic, bypassing authentication methods, and exposing sensitive data transferred through a provider’s APIs.
“There is a lack of recognition of the critical nature of API security,” Bansal told TechCrunch in an interview, “as well as an ignorance of the ever-increasing attack surface of APIs and a resistance to adopting security APIs due to entrenched investments in security solutions that do not directly address the API security problem.
According to Bansal, more and more companies are leveraging APIs, thanks in part to the boom in generative AI, but are unwittingly opening themselves up to attacks in the process. According to a recent study, the number of APIs used by businesses increased by more than 200% between July 2022 and July 2023. Gartner, meanwhile, predicts that more than 80% of businesses will have used generative AI APIs or deployed applications compatible with generative AI by 2026.
What Traceable does to try to protect these APIs is apply AI to analyze usage data to learn normal API behavior and spot activities that stray from the line basic. Traceable’s software, which runs on-premises or in a fully managed cloud, can discover and catalog existing and new APIs, including undocumented and “orphaned” (i.e. obsolete) APIs, in real time , according to Bansal.
Image credits: Traceable
“In order to detect modern threat scenarios, Traceable trained internal models by refining large-scale open source language base models with labeled attack data,” Bansal explained. “Our platform provides tools for API discovery, testing, protection, and threat hunting workflows for IT teams.”
The market for API security solutions is quickly becoming crowded, with vendors such as Noname Security, 42Crunch, Vorlon, Salt Security, Cequence, Ghost Security, Pynt, Akamai, Escape, and F5 all vying for customers. According to Research and Markets, the segment could grow at a compound annual growth rate of 31.5% between 2023 and 2030, driven by growing cybersecurity threats and demand for more secure APIs.
But Bansal says Traceable is holding strong, analyzing about 500 billion API calls per month for about 50 clients and forecasting a doubling of revenue this year. Most of Traceable’s customers are in the enterprise sector, but Bansal says the company is exploring a pilot project with governments.
“Traceable is building a long-term sustainable business, which from a financial perspective means we have a very healthy margin profile that continues to improve as our revenues grow,” he said. declared. “We are not profitable today by choice, because we invest in the business responsibly… We focus on strategic investments that maximize returns, not just expenses. »
To that end, Traceable announced today that it has raised $30 million in a strategic investment from a group of backers including Citi Ventures (the venture capital arm of Citigroup), IVP, Geodesic Capital, Sorenson Capital and Unusual Ventures. Valuing Traceable at $500 million after the money and bringing Traceable’s total raised to $110 million, the new funds will be dedicated to product development, strengthening Traceable’s platform and teams. customer engineering and developing the company’s partner program, Bansal said.
Traceable currently has approximately 180 employees. Bansal expects the headcount to reach 230 people by the end of 2024, with most of the new investment going into hiring.
“Traceable was not a fundraiser, because we still had significant cash flow before this investment,” Bansal said, adding that Traceable had secured a “significant” line of credit in addition to the new funds, “but we We have received significant inbound demand from investors. Thanks to the combination of strategic alignment with Citi Ventures and attractive investment terms, we have decided to take a smaller investment now to accelerate our product initiatives. marketing before thinking about more substantial fundraising.
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