AppOmni Snags $40 million Series B Led by Scale Venture Partners
AppOmni, a leading vendor of SaaS security products and services based in San Francisco, today announced a $40 million Series B venture round. The round is led by San Mateo, California-based Scale Venture Partners. Other investors include Salesforce Ventures and ServiceNow Ventures. The company has secured $53 million in venture funding so far.
According to a press release, AppOmni, which was founded in 2018, has experienced 9x revenue growth in the last year.
SaaS Security Goes Deep
AppOmni addresses a deep, layered security issue from which Salesforce suffers. As noted by Scale partner Ariel Tseitlin on the investor’s company blog, “many SaaS applications are like operating systems with thousands of permissions and many interconnected external applications.” As IT users suffer from SaaS sprawl, an organization’s attack surface multiplies without control. AppOmni aims to deal with that problem.
“AppOmni goes deep into an application and maps each permission, setting, and data type onto an ontology. As permissions are changed, the AppOmni system reviews changes and surfaces the most risky ones. These alerts are fed into an organization’s existing security operations, often a SOC, and triaged by analysts,” Tseitlin writes.
Salesforce Ventures managing director Robert Keith praised the multi-vendor nature of the deal. “Security is a shared responsibility between SaaS vendors and their customers. AppOmni is uniquely positioned to provide businesses with the tools and visibility needed to securely manage the use and data access of SaaS environments,” said Mr. Keith in the press release.
AppOmni Keeps Turning Heads
AppOmni already has the pedigree and experience to keep attracting customers before this investment. CEO Bendan O’Connor was a senior security officer at both Salesforce and ServiceNow. CTO Brian Soby is also a well-know figure in Salesforce security circles. They already have the experience needed to command Salesforce security for the most demanding customers.
As Salesforce goes after key industrial sectors, AppOmni continues to be a critical element in the company’s sales efforts.
Multi-Cloud Security
Some day, IT leaders will apply data access and governance models across ERP, data integration platforms, analysis rollups, IT services, and endpoints. Unified governance across clouds could be a successful pattern for an application security company, and AppOmni is purpose-built to take on the challenge, especially with the Series B round.
As AppOmni knows, doing security in more than one cloud is likely to involve business or organizational complications. The degree to which AppOmni can work with those complications will impact their long-term prospects.
