Palo Alto, Calif. – Dec. 8, 2020 – Salt Security, the leading API security company, today announced it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investors Tenaya Capital, S Capital VC, and Y Combinator. This latest funding round, which follows closely on the heels of a $20 million Series A raise in June, cements Salt Security as the leader in the API security market. The additional funding will enable the company to accelerate its business in 2021 more rapidly, with a focus on investing in product development, sales and marketing, and customer acquisition. To date, the company has raised a total of $60 million in equity financing.
“APIs have become a fundamental unit of software. Salt Security enables organizations to discover APIs, prevent real-time attacks, and facilitate remediation, so customers can continue to operate and innovate in an increasingly digitized world,” said Carl Eschenbach, Partner, Sequoia. “In the emerging API security space, Salt Security has shown its leadership by being first to market and offering the most advanced solution—ultimately, making it the type of outlier company that Sequoia loves to partner with.”
Eschenbach will join Tom Banahan, Partner, Tenaya Capital and Haim Sadger, Founding Partner, S Capital, on the Salt Security board of directors and brings a wealth of technology and cybersecurity knowledge and expertise, including serving as president and COO of VMware for nearly 15 years. He currently sits on the boards of other top enterprise technology companies including Palo Alto Networks, Snowflake, Workday, and Zoom.
“In our rapidly shifting world of digital transformation, API-first strategies are a priority,” said Michael Montoya, CISO, Equinix. “The security landscape is shifting to APIs, and Salt Security is on the cutting edge of enterprise security strategy. As our API economy gains momentum, we look forward to working with Salt Security to secure our digital transformation.”
Named a 2020 Cool Vendor in API Strategy by Gartner, Inc. and providing the only patented API security solution for every stage of the API life cycle, Salt Security supports more use cases and environments than any other offering. To accelerate its development and market-leading position, the company has grown its executive leadership team in recent months. Elad Koren has joined as chief product officer, having recently served as VP of product at API bot mitigation company PerimeterX. Michelle McLean joins as vice president of marketing, moving from container and Kubernetes security company StackRox.
“Raising both Series A and B, growing our customer base 200%, and building unmatched technical capabilities–all during this tumultuous year–gives us a formidable lead in the market we created and defined,” said Salt Security co-founder and CEO Roey Eliyahu. “Having someone of Carl’s caliber and experience guiding us will simply accelerate our success in the API security market.”