Israeli cybersecurity startup Valence emerges from stealth with $7M in funding to secure the business application mesh

Data breaches exposed 18.8 billion records in the first half of this year, according to the 2021 Mid Year Data Breach Report. A data breach is caused by a number of factors including weak and stolen credentials (passwords), malware, social engineering, insider threats, back doors, improper configuration, user errors, application vulnerabilities, and others. The causes also vary depending on the company and industry.

In today’s hyper-connected world, organizations operate hundreds of best-of-breed SaaS and self-hosted business applications. Business owners and citizen developers interconnect these applications via direct APIs, SaaS marketplaces, and hyper-automation platforms such as Zapier and Workato. This creates the “Business Application Mesh.” While this has many business and productivity benefits, it creates a growing risk surface and a network of indiscriminate and shadow connectivity between applications, potentially leading to supply chain attacks, misconfigurations, and data exposure. Now, one startup is on a mission to secure the business application mesh.

Enter Valence, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based cybersecurity startup that delivers the first security platform to bring zero trust principles to the Business Application Mesh. Valence provides comprehensive visibility into the mesh of business application integrations and automated workflows while identifying and mitigating associated risks and enforcing policy controls.

Today, Valence announced it has emerged from stealth with $7M in seed funding to secure the business application mesh. The round was led by YL Ventures with participation from renowned security executives and serial entrepreneurs.

Valence was founded by experienced cybersecurity professionals and serial entrepreneurs Yoni Shohet, CEO, and Shlomi Matichin, CTO. Industry leaders and security luminaries participated in Valence’s seed round, including Phil Venables, former CISO at Goldman Sachs; Justin Somaini, CSO at Unity Technologies; Karl Mattson, former CISO at PennyMac; Maarten Van Horenbeeck, CISO at Zendesk; Michael Sutton, former CISO at Zscaler; Shay Banon, co-founder and CEO at Elastic, and Benny Schnaider, co-founder and Chairman at Salto.

The growing number of third-party breaches also highlights the inadequacy of current solutions in managing third-party risk. For example, the Mimecast breach, reported earlier this year as part of the SolarWinds attack campaign, saw attackers gain unauthorized access to Microsoft 365 tenants.

“Too much risk or too much restriction leaves security teams with no good path forward,” says Yoni Shohet, Valence co-founder and CEO. “Our goal at Valence is to allow teams to understand and protect the Business Application Mesh risk surface from risky connections, activities, and third-party access without inhibiting its ability to grow and deliver more business value.”

Valence’s platform is already deployed at select global enterprises which were able to significantly reduce their risk surface with actionable insights. The platform delivers immediate, non-intrusive risk surface management, bringing Business Application Mesh connectivity out of the shadows, providing organizations with a visible map of their app-to-app integrations, and spotlighting risky third-party connections. It continuously alerts on anomalous activities and unauthorized data access across the Business Application Mesh. Allowing security teams to be more preemptive regarding risks, the platform applies zero trust principles and enables enforcement of policies, such as least privilege, significantly reducing the risk surface.