Israeli cybersecurity tech startup Oxeye emerges from stealth with $5.3M in funding to disrupt the traditional application security testing with cloud-native AST 

For decades, organizations rely on traditional application security testing (AST) to find and eliminate vulnerabilities in their software. However, as these organizations move to the cloud, they quickly realized that their legacy AST approach is not only unscalable but also falls short when the codes have to be deployed and tested in multi-cloud environments. Now, one Israeli application security testing startup is on a mission to help organizations identify and resolve the most critical code vulnerabilities.

Enter Oxeye, an Israeli cybersecurity tech startup that provides a cloud-native application security testing solution that is designed to overcome the challenges imposed by the complex nature of modern architectures. Unlike the legacy AST approach, Oxeye disrupts traditional application security testing (AST) approaches by offering a contextual, effortless, and comprehensive solution to ensure no vulnerable code ever reaches production.

Today, Oxeye announced it has closed a $5.3 million seed financing round led by MoreVC, a seed-stage venture capital fund in Israel. The latest round includes support from i3 Equity Partners, and other cybersecurity-focused investors as the company prepare to protect the world’s most popular Web applications with next-generation cloud-native Application Security Testing.

According to a FutureScape report by IDC, “By 2023, over 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and deployed using cloud-native approaches – the same number of apps developed in the last 40 years. Most of these will be targeted at industry-specific digital transformation use cases. This explosion of new digital apps and services will define the new minimum competitive requirements in every industry.”

While the advantages of cloud-native applications are many-fold, they present unique security challenges that until now have not been properly addressed. Intricate and layered attack surfaces that are widely misunderstood and under-secured are in need of resolution.

Containers, APIs, microservices, clusters, and other cloud-based components all comprise a large portion of cloud-hosted apps. Given the complexities of such an advanced architecture, traditional testing methodologies simply aren’t enough to address security holistically for these environments.

Founded in 2021 by CEO Dean Agron and Ron Vider, whom both have over a decade of experience in application and cloud security, Oxeye was created by a team that combines both young elite cyber researchers and veteran experienced engineers and advisors, where culture is focused on excellence.

Oxeye leverages the abilities of cloud-native and building a structured solution that combines best-of-class features into a single powerful solution. The new funding will be used to complete product development, increase mindshare around the company’s novel approach, and expand sales, marketing, and operations.

“We are thrilled to add Oxeye to our growing successful cybersecurity portfolio. The founding team at Oxeye brings together a rare combination of deep expertise and youthful daring, and has developed an elegant solution for cloud-native application security,” said Jack Levy, Co-founder, and Partner at MoreVC. “With modern applications entering the market by the millions, developers and AppSec professionals will require higher grade application security that presents a limited impact on DevSecOps and ensures a positive customer experience. Oxeye is on track to bring this advanced brand of security to the world.”

“Oxeye solves the challenges legacy application security testing tools present in modern software environments and it is an honor to be an investment partner of such an innovative solution,” said Noga Kap, Managing Partner at i3 Equity Partners.

Currently in Beta, the Oxeye security testing solution is built for AppSec, Dev, and DevOps teams, helping to shift security left while accelerating development cycles, reducing friction, and eliminating risks. The Oxeye cloud-native application security testing solution overcomes the challenges imposed by the complex nature of modern architectures. This positions the technology to disrupt traditional application security testing (AST) approaches by offering a multi-layer, contextual, effortless, and comprehensive solution designed to ensure that no vulnerable code ever reaches production.

“Oxeye’s laser focus on the cloud-native sector of Application Security Testing (as opposed to traditional AST) gives the company a unique advantage in one of the fastest-growing areas of technology,” said Michael Sutton, former ZScaler CISO and now Investor and Advisor. “With successful cyberattacks costing millions to application providers, the revenue opportunity for Oxeye is quite significant. We are pleased to support this promising industry player.”

“Cloud-native is the de-facto standard for building new applications. This tectonic shift has a major effect on code vulnerabilities. These are no longer only flawed lines of code, but rather vulnerable flows stretching over multiple microservices and multiple infrastructure layers.” said Dean Agron, CEO and Co-founder, Oxeye. “With Oxeye, developers and AppSec professionals are promised the most prominent, automated, security testing platform across all important stages of software development to ensure apps are both operationally efficient and highly secure.”