Just ten months after securing an abnormally large seed-stage funding round, software supply chain startup Endor Labs has attracted renewed interest from venture capital investors.
The company, founded by serial entrepreneur Varun Badhwar, has closed a massive $70 million Series A round of financing to fuel ambitious plans to build a dependency lifecycle management platform.
The company said investors in the latest round included Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP), Coatue, Dell Technologies Capital, Section 32, and a roster of bold-faced names in cybersecurity. The new round includes $22M converted to equity from the previous round, Endor Labs said.
Badhwar, who previously sold Redlock to Palo Alto Networks for $173 million, said the funding will expand innovation in the areas of code and pipeline security.
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.
“Application security is fundamentally broken today – engineering teams are constantly being asked to deploy dozens of AppSec tools in the CI/CD pipeline, which creates significant work for developers, slows down feature delivery, and increases friction between the engineering and security teams,” Badhwar said, arguing that the path forward lies in consolidating the DevSecOps toolchain, simplifying tool deployments, and prioritizing the few risks that actually matter.
The large financing comes at a time when investors are betting heavily on new startups in the open source software security ecosystem. Earlier this week, San Francisco-based Socket closed a $20 million Series A round for technology that uses “content-based analysis” to look for the behavior of software dependencies to quickly flag and fix suspicious activity.
The crowded category also includes products from Ox Security ($34 million raised), Chainguard ($55 million raised) and Legit Security ($34 million in financing), Aqua Security ($265 million raised), ReversingLabs ($81 million raised) and Tidelift ($27 million funding).
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