PingSafe, an India-based cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) platform powered by attacker intelligence, has on Thursday announced its emergence from stealth mode with $3.3 million in seed funding.

The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia’s (now known as Peak XV Partners) Surge with participation from prominent angel investors, including Rahul Chari (Co-Founder & CTO, PhonePe), Neeraj Arora (ex-CBO, WhatsApp), Saurya Prakash (Co-Founder, Recko), Vivek Ramachandran (Founder, SquareX) and Gaurav Agarwal (Co-Founder & CTO, Tata 1mg) and Tanglin Ventures, PingSafe said in a statement.

In addition to advancing PingSafe’s unique approach to cloud security and product innovation, the funding will be used to accelerate the firm’s business development efforts in India and Southeast Asia.

“Having discovered thousands of critical vulnerabilities in leading companies, we understand the mindset of hackers,

“At PingSafe, we incorporate this unique perspective into our CNAPP platform by adding capabilities like the Offensive Security Engine that identify the most critical vulnerabilities and provide proof of exploitability, reducing the overhead of security teams,” said Anand Prakash, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, PingSafe.

With the cloud security market evolving from point solutions towards context-aware platforms, he said PingSafe’s CNAPP platform is the next evolution in providing more comprehensive cloud security to organizations.

Founded by Anand Prakash, who has found vulnerabilities across companies like Uber, Meta, and Twitter, and Nishant Mittal, PingSafe envisions being a one-stop shop for all cloud security-related organizational needs.

Along with the PingSafe team of cybersecurity researchers and industry executives, PingSafe aspires to be companies’ go-to security thought partner as they modernize their cloud security posture.

PingSafe serves customers across multiple geographies and verticals, including notable names like Flipkart, Razorpay, Near Intelligence Inc, Skyflow, Belvilla, Recko, and others.

PingSafe has seen tremendous traction, growing ten times in revenue since last year.

It has also quadrupled its customer base, replacing existing security industry incumbents while showcasing its ability to retain and increase revenue from existing customers.

Cited Kroll in 2022, PingSafe said 59 percent of businesses in Asia Pacific (APAC) reported being the victim of a cyber attack.

Although security expenditure has increased to prevent misconfigurations within organizations, it said cyberattacks have become increasingly frequent and sophisticated, with attackers utilizing multiple individual vulnerabilities to compromise systems.

It said that this highlights a clear need for a platform that combines not only multiple capabilities like cloud security posture management (CSPM) and cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) in a single solution but also imitates novel attacks on an organization’s cloud infrastructure to highlight the most severe issues for the security team to address first.

PingSafe aims to be the cloud security platform that bridges this gap between attackers’ modus operandi and security solutions currently on the market.

By aggregating intelligence via Cloud application programming interface (APIs) and logs, PingSafe utilises its graph database to generate a normalized architecture of the cloud real estate of a client.

Utilizing its offensive security engine, PingSafe then detects toxic and exploitable vulnerabilities, allowing security teams to make efficient decisions without relying on human verification of alerts.

Furthermore, given that every company has a unique approach towards software development lifecycle, security, and investigation, PingSafe has a no-code policy builder that allows users to define custom policies better suited for their environments, giving complete cloud security coverage across any combination of cloud services and technology stacks.

“As organizations grow and scale applications in the cloud, holistic cloud security management is critical to ensure resilience against threats and breaches,” said Rahul Chari, Co-Founder & CTO, PhonePe.

According to him, PingSafe’s team is highly motivated and has the right market experience to make PingSafe a leader in this space.

Lenish Namath, Vice President of Technology, Cloud, SRE & Security at Halodoc, said that cyber-attacks and hackers are getting smarter, leveraging automated tools to evolve their approach continuously.

“PingSafe understands an attacker’s mindset and strategy and can predict their patterns, which has been a great success for us,

“Also, it gives us better visibility across our complex cloud real estate,” he added.

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