Operant AI Secures $10M Series A to Protect the Modern Cloud Across APIs, Applications and AI
September 12 2024 - 6:00AM
Operant AI, the world’s only Runtime AI Application Protection
Platform, announced today that it has raised $10 million in a
Series A funding round co-led by SineWave Ventures and Felicis,
with participation from Alumni Ventures, Massive, Calm Ventures,
Gaingels, alongside industry-expert angels. This investment brings
Operant AI’s total funding to $13.5 million, which they will use to
accelerate team and product expansion bringing unprecedented
transparency and active cloud-native protection to all APIs, AI,
and cloud applications with a particular focus on securing the
entire data-in-use lifecycle as it flows through every layer of
modern application environments.
As part of this announcement, Patricia Muoio,
partner at SineWave Ventures and former NSA/DoD leader, and Nancy
Wang, Venture Partner at Felicis and former General Manager /
Director of Data Protection at AWS, will join Operant AI’s Board of
Directors. These appointments strengthen the breadth and depth of
the company’s product and market approach as they work together to
get Operant AI’s real-time protection into the hands of enterprises
for whom blocking modern API and AI-fueled attacks couldn’t be more
urgent.
“Real runtime protection is the future,” said
Patricia Muoio, Partner at SineWave Ventures and Operant AI’s lead
investor. “There is so much noise in the industry right now, and it
is getting in the way of the simple truth that modern attacks -
especially AI attacks - absolutely cannot be fought by static
technology. Operant’s innovations completely change what security
teams can expect from a runtime protection platform, and the speed
and ease with which Operant can secure the open attack surface
inside the application perimeter both democratizes access to
critical security capabilities and brings a level of security to
modern app development that is urgent and extremely valuable.”
“Kubernetes has transformed application
development, driving faster deployments but also increasing the
risk of vulnerabilities,” said Nancy Wang, Venture Partner at
Felicis and Operant’s Seed investor. “Operant’s unique runtime
security solution provides a critical new layer of AI protection,
complementing application security programs by preventing the
majority of OWASP Top 10 attacks and AI attacks that static
analysis tools alone cannot detect.”
Operant AI’s unique approach to securing modern
applications brings together instant live blueprints of every
application layer - from processes to services to APIs, while also
providing extensive active protection through its Adaptive Internal
Firewalls and Proactive Protection Guardrails. Operant AI’s
innovative shielding technology enables security engineers and Ops
teams to block >80% of the OWASP top 10 attacks across APIs,
LLMs, and Kubernetes - all without any instrumentation or
application code changes. Their powerful combination of
capabilities has been recognized in Gartner’s 2024 API Threat
Protection Market Guide, Gartner’s Emerging Tech Kubernetes Runtime
Security Report, and Forrester’s 2024 Zero Trust Landscape. The
platform meets the market at a moment when cloud transformation has
reached a new peak, fueled by the race to deploy AI features and
applications on new cloud infrastructure that hasn’t yet been
secured.
The urgency of securing a freshly critical and
rapidly evolving attack surface isn’t new to co-founders Vrajesh
Bhavsar, CEO, and Dr. Priyanka Tembey, CTO. Bhavsar and Tembey
worked together over a decade ago using Machine Learning to secure
apps on Android devices while at Qualcomm Research, back when the
rapid adoption of the Android operating system created new
opportunities for attackers to infiltrate devices and steal
critical data.
“In the race towards cloud innovation and AI
application development, tons of companies are sharing access to
common APIs and open source code that leave the doors wide open to
new types of attacks like zero day vulns and data exfiltration
through open APIs,” said Dr. Priyanka Tembey, Operant AI’s
co-founder and CTO. “Predicting which threats are the most
exploitable and combining that knowledge with signals of
criticality so that we are razor-focused on proactively shielding
against the most dangerous attacks is absolutely critical to making
real-time protection work in the real world.”
Bhavsar and Tembey bring together a unique
combination of knowledge and experience from hardware to software -
Bhavsar started his career as a kernel engineer at Apple building
core security functionality into the iPhone and later founding the
Machine Learning business unit at ARM, while Tembey used her PhD in
computer science from Georgia Tech to architect VMWare’s hybrid
cloud product. They were joined by Ashley Roof as a co-founder and
CMO in 2021, bringing GTM experience from Google and other rapidly
growing tech startups.
Operant AI’s Series A comes at a critical moment
in cybersecurity’s shift towards addressing cloud-native threats at
a P0 level of importance. “The level of innovation happening in
today’s cloud-native world is astounding,” said Vrajesh Bhavsar,
co-founder and CEO of Operant AI. “The fragmented way in which
customers have been forced to buy and stitch together a plethora of
security tools to achieve basic levels of visibility has become a
blocker to responsible application and AI development. That’s why
we’re breaking down the traditional barriers between API, cloud,
and application protection without placing the burden of
instrumentation on the customer. It really allows security
engineers to fully understand their multidimensional application
environments beyond the WAF and within the vibrant and complex
internals so that we can work together to actively block so many of
the modern attacks that simply can’t be stopped by traditional
static or one-dimensional approaches.”
For more information, please visit
www.operant.ai/series-a.
About Operant AI: Operant AI is
the only Runtime Application Protection Platform that actively
shields every layer of live applications from infra to APIs.
Operant’s unique multidimensional approach protects where other
AppSec, API, and AI protection platforms drop off - actively
securing the entire “cloud within the cloud” including all APIs,
services, and identities beyond the firewalls. Operant’s Adaptive
Internal Firewalls block >80% of the most critical and common
runtime attacks ranging from data exfiltration to unauthorized
access to AI supply chain attacks, and many more. Within minutes of
Operant’s single-step deployment, security and platform teams gain
a completely new level of real-time visibility and cloud-native
protection for their entire cloud application stacks bringing
frictionless security to dev, sec, and ops so that teams can deploy
products and AI faster without security holding them back.
About SineWave Ventures SineWave
Ventures occupies the valuable space where the Valley, Fortune 500,
and the Public Sector interact. We are an early-stage venture
capital firm dedicated to accelerating technologies across the
Fortune 500 and public sector ecosystems. The firm currently has
over $300mm in committed capital across diversified funds. Our
value lies in the expertise that drives our thesis, our ability to
help companies navigate unfamiliar verticals and generate diverse
revenue sources, and our unique networks that we can draw on to
help our portfolio companies. Our thesis-driven investment has
resulted in a concentrated portfolio focused on computing,
cybersecurity, networking, and data and analytics. For more
information, visit sinewave.vc
About Felicis Founded in 2006,
Felicis is a venture capital firm investing in companies
reinventing core markets, as well as those creating frontier
technologies. The firm was the first to offer a Founder Development
pledge, providing needed resources to help founders scale
themselves. Felicis focuses on early-stage investments and
currently manages over $3B in capital across nine funds. The firm
is an early backer of more than 49 companies valued at $1B+. More
than 100 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone
public, including Adyen, Credit Karma, Cruise, Fitbit, Guardant
Health, Meraki, Ring, and Shopify. The firm is based in Menlo Park
and San Francisco in California. Learn more at felicis.com.
Media Contact Erica Anderson
operant@offleashpr.com