Valence emerges from stealth with $7 million in funding to solve integrations risks

Cybersecurity startup Valence announced on Tuesday that it has raised $7 million in seed funding led by YL Ventures with participation from renowned security executives and serial entrepreneurs. Valence's solution is focused on managing the risks from third-party integrations and securing app-to-app connectivity in the modern business environment.

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.

“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.”

Today’s hyper-connected 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 hyperautomation 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.

Valence’s platform is currently deployed at several global enterprises, providing the 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.

“We’ve heard growing industry concerns related to app-to-app interconnectivity and hyperautomation processes, but we knew that only an all-star team with the right background and talent could both define the problem space and design a revolutionary solution to solve it,” said John Brennan, partner at YL Ventures. “Valence’s security platform illuminates the Business Application Mesh, providing security teams with crucial visibility and the tools required to secure it.”