Just 18 months after it was founded, Noname Security is now worth $1 billion.
The rapid rise in valuation for the Palo Alto startup is due to growing security concerns about a popular shortcut to creating software apps.
NoName Security, whose legal name is NoName Gate LLC, has developed a popular way to protect application programming interfaces, more commonly known as APIs. They are used to help two pieces of software "talk" to each other. This enables many popular app features such as payments and instant messaging.
But APIs are increasingly being targeted by hackers. The research firm Gartner estimates that 90% of web-enabled apps will have more exposure to attack in the form of APIs than by exploiting human users.
That has helped Noname gain traction and $220 million in funding just a year after coming out of stealth. In the Series C round led by Georgian and Lightspeed Venture Partners that was announced Wednesday, the company raised $135 million. Existing investors Insight Partners, Cyberstarts, Next47, Forgepoint and The Syndicate Group (TSG) also participated.
The company has grown from 30 to 40 employees a year ago to about 200 today. Co-founder and CEO Oz Golan told the Business Journal that the new funding will help him double his workforce in the next year across the globe.
"APIs have become a major concern because of they can be used exchange some of the most sensitive information that businesses and people have," Golan said.
He said Noname provides customers with two types of cybersecurity. First is a passive protection that detects attempts to exploit APIs and takes action against them. The second actively searches for vulnerable APIs and offers ways to secure them.
"Enterprises across all industries are experiencing widespread digitization, accelerating the adoption of thousands of new APIs and creating a critical need to secure them for businesses on a global scale," Golan said.
He estimates that Noname Security has discovered and fixed misconfigured APIs that could have led to the data leakage of billions of sensitive records. He said his company's software actively blocks over 1,000 attacks per day across its customers.
It's still very early days for Noname, but Golan said that it is seeing more than 400% customer and revenue growth each quarter. He said those customers include two of the five largest pharmaceutical firms, one of the three largest retailers and one of the world’s three largest telecoms.
Guru Chahal of Lightspeed said in Wednesday's funding announcement, "As API complexity grows, the Noname API Security platform is enabling organizations to detect and secure APIs in a way they couldn’t a year ago, and we’re excited to continue supporting Noname’s journey."
