It’s officially a venture capital funding frenzy in the software supply chain security space.
Less than two weeks after Ox Security banked a whopping $34 million in seed-stage financing, a new Silicon Valley startup called Endor Labs announced the closing of a $25 million seed round to build a dependency lifecycle management platform.
Investors betting on Endor Labs include Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital.
The unusually large early-stage financing for software supply chain technology startups also includes Chainguard’s $50 million Series A ($55 million total raised) and Legit Security’s $34 million in financing.
Endor Labs is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Varun Badhwar, who previously sold Redlock to Palo Alto Networks for $173 million. Badhwar and a team of former Palo Alto engineers are now working on technology to help development and security teams maximize software reuse by safely evaluating, maintaining, and updating dependencies.
[ READ: Cybersecurity Leaders Scramble to Decipher SBOM Mandate ]
“The average enterprise has more than 40,000 open source dependencies directly downloaded by developers. Each of those dependencies can bring in on average 77 other (transitive) dependencies creating a massive, uncontrollable sprawl that slows down development and increases the attack surface across multiple dimensions,” Endor Labs said in a note announcing the new financing.
The company has ambitious plans to build a platform that provides security and development teams with an understanding of how dependencies are being used across their organization.
Endor Labs said it performs deep analytics on each OSS dependency to uncover potential security and operational risks beyond just known vulnerabilities.
[“We help] customers select better dependencies; secure, monitor and maintain them at scale; and quickly respond to incidents like Log4j. Having a full understanding of their dependency graph also lets customers generate and analyze accurate SBOMs, and have a single source of truth for their entire software inventory,” the company said.
Endor Labs, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is pushing a lifecycle approach to help contain dependency sprawl, reduce false positives, quickly respond to vulnerable or malicious packages, and get accurate and complete SBOMs with vulnerability and exploitability information.
Endor Labs competitors also include Aqua Security ($265 million raised), ReversingLabs ($81 million raised) and Tidelift ($27 million funding).
Related: Chainguard Bags Massive $50M Series A for Supply Chain Security
Related: Investors Bet on Ox Security to Guard Software Supply Chains
Related: Legit Security Raises $30M to Tackle Supply Chain Security
Related: Tidelift Raises $27 Million to Tackle Open Source Supply Chain
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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