Israel’s build.security completes $6 million seed round to simplify enterprise authorization

Israeli cybersecurity company build.security announced Wednesday that it has completed a $6 million seed round led by YL Ventures with participation from George Kurtz, the co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, which is considered one of the leading cyber companies in the U.S.

The company was founded by industry veterans Amit Kanfer (CEO) and Dekel Braunstein (CTO), offering a new approach to authorization, providing developers with the building blocks they need to quickly generate and manage best-practice authorization controls across enterprise applications at scale.

Joining build.security’s seed round are cyber security experts Michael Sutton, former CISO of Zscaler; Sounil Yu, former Chief Security Scientist at Bank of America; Dan Amiga, former CTO and co-founder of Fireglass (acquired by Symantec); Eyal Gruner, CEO and co-founder of Cynet; and Eran Barak, former CEO and co-founder of Hexadite (acquired by Microsoft). CrowdStrike CPO Amol Kulkarni has joined build.security’s board of directors.

“We’ve solved the inherent complexity of authorization resulting from how radically its implementation varies from one application to the next,” said Kanfer, build.security’s CEO and co-founder. “We’re helping developers easily express RBAC and ABAC with a flexible, managed and off-the-shelf platform, as well as open-source projects, that provide all the tools developers need to author and immediately enforce policies at scale. build.security is building authorization so that developers don’t have to.”

With enterprises relying more and more on software, developers are becoming key players in today’s cybersecurity landscape as gatekeepers of the operations and sensitive data involved in enterprise applications. As responsibility for secure code shifts left, developers are tasked with overseeing key security measures in application development, chief among them authorization and authentication. However, unlike authentication, authorization remains an elusive challenge for many engineering teams, largely due to an absence of enterprise grade solutions. As a result, developers are forced to build an array of highly complex authorization models, policy engines and enforcement points themselves to account for an ever-growing list of identities, resources and context attributes. The time consuming, confusing and error-prone nature of these processes heightens the risk of insufficient software protection, leaving enterprises vulnerable to exploitation.

“build.security’s innovative approach allows developers to focus on developing apps at unprecedented speed without the burden of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) implementation weighing them down,” noted CrowdStrike’s Kurtz.

“build.security’s innovation is an incredible win for the developer community—they’ve made authorization easy,” John Brennan, Partner at YL Ventures and a build.security board member said. “We’re excited by Amit and Dekel’s unique plug-and-play approach to API and function-level authorization, as well as the breadth of visibility their control plane offers. Their approach will enable developers and enterprises to build secure software at scale.”