Application programming interfaces, or APIs as they are commonly known, are the foundation of everything we do online. APIs allow two things on the Internet to talk to each other, including connected devices or phone apps.
But the huge increase in API usage — around half of all Internet traffic — puts business data at risk. A common security risk is granting third parties overly permissive API access. Malicious hackers can leverage APIs to gain access to a company’s sensitive information.
Cyber security startup Vorlon says it helps businesses protect their data from such incidents using its platform, and raised $15.7 million to improve its technology.
Founded in 2022 by former Palo Alto Networks executives Amir Khayat and Amichay Spivak, Vorlon analyzes network traffic to detect and remediate potential API abuse in real time.
In an interview, Khayat said the company’s technology runs the analysis and tells the customer “something to be alerted to and take action on.”
Vorlon continuously monitors a company’s APIs and notifies them when vendors make updates, helping to better understand their exposure or potential exposure, Khayat told TechCrunch. The founder also noted that along with detecting vulnerabilities and exposures, Vorlon’s platform looks at the type of data that third-party APIs are accessing and where they can connect to other applications.
Vorlon uses AI to analyze and map all the API communication it monitors and translate it into human-readable language. This helps users get a summary of their third-party apps. Vorlon also provides an AI chatbot to allow businesses to search for information in human natural language about any security threats or issues they have. Khayat said Vorlon doesn’t send chatbot data anywhere. Instead, it sends user queries to its own databases, and the chatbot will return information from the startup’s database.
“In many cases, organizations won’t learn about a vendor’s data breach until months after the fact,” said Steve Loughlin, Partner at Accel, in a statement. “Vorlon’s ability to reduce the time between threat detection and remediation to minutes is what makes this technology so powerful.”
Vorlon counts SafeBreach and pre-sales engineering platform Vivun among its first customers since launching its platform in February. The company says it sees significant demand from the healthcare and financial sectors and is targeting businesses with at least 1,500 employees.
The Delaware-based startup, with an R&D subsidiary in Tel Aviv, currently has about 22 employees and plans to grow that number by adding more people to its sales and product R&D teams using the money from the Series A round it led Accel.
The all-equity round was led by Shield Capital and cybersecurity angel investors, including Demisto co-founders Slavik Markovich, Rishi Bhargava, Dan Sarel and Guy Rinat, who worked closely with Vorlon’s co-founders at Demisto before it was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019. Former Exabeam CEO Nir Polak and Fox Corporation CTO Paul Cheesborough are also key investors in Vorlon.
Correction: An earlier version of this report incorrectly attributed Hubspot as a Vorlon customer due to an editing error. ZW.
