Looking to grab a slice of the lucrative enterprise AppSec market, Backslash Security emerged from stealth Wednesday with $8 million in seed-stage capital and new technology to identify and mitigate “toxic code flows” in cloud-native applications.
The Israeli startup said the financing was provided by StageOne Ventures, First Rays Venture Partners, D. E. Shaw & Co. A roster of prominent security practitioners and entrepreneurs also joined the round.
Based in Tel Aviv, Backslash is building new technology to help enterprise AppSec teams visualize, prioritize and easily act upon high-risk code combinations, called “toxic code flows,” in their cloud-native applications.
Backslash chief executive Shahar Man said the idea is to bring modern tooling to application security teams that are stuck with a decades-old paradigm of noisy vulnerability scanners.
He said the plan is for Backslash to “uplevel the cloud-native security game” for AppSec teams by capturing the full context of cloud-native application security risk.
Man said the company’s product was specifically designed to address the persistent, time-consuming and manual ways of discovering and mapping applications code risks, and the cloud-native context gaps left unaddressed by existing SAST tools.
Backslash’s product is promising these capabilities:
- Contextual visibility provides AppSecs teams with automatic discovery and mapping of cloud-native application code and dependencies via contextual visual dashboards, without the need to read or understand the underlying code.
- Automatic threat model visualization to map and serve up a preferred threat model
- Automatic high-risk code prioritization, informed by application cloud posture in production.
- Quick-fix remediation to simplify vulnerability and risk remediation with automated risk identification
- Scale by policy alignment: Frees up AppSec teams to set and enforce cloud-native security policies while cutting the time and resources needed to chase code issues.
Related: AppSec Firm Cider Security Emerges From Stealth With $38M in Funding
Related: Oligo Security Exits Stealth with $28M for AppSec, Open Source Security
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Related: AppSec Startup ArmorCode Raises $14 Million

Ryan Naraine is Editor-at-Large at SecurityWeek and host of the popular Security Conversations podcast series. He is a security community engagement expert who has built programs at major global brands, including Intel Corp., Bishop Fox and GReAT. Ryan is a founding-director of the Security Tinkerers non-profit, an advisor to early-stage entrepreneurs, and a regular speaker at security conferences around the world.
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