Spin technology, a data protection software provider targeting enterprise customers, today announced it has raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Blueprint Equity with participation from Santa Barbara Venture Partners and Blu Venture Investors. CEO Dmitry Dontov said fresh capital — which Spin values at $55 million post-money — will be used to support growth, expand Spin’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and grow its business. marketing, sales and engineering teams of the startup.
Most companies use third-party apps to extend their cloud SaaS environments. In fact, companies today to use 89 SaaS apps on average, up 24% since 2016, according to Okta. But while these apps help relieve the workload normally done by internal teams, they can expose organizations to attacks. For example, third-party apps may come with misconfigured guest account functionality, integrations, and connections that lead to data breaches.
To address the problem, Dontov founded Palo Alto-based Spin in 2017. A three-time entrepreneur, Dontov says he was inspired to develop a platform that uses AI to detect “shadow IT” activities in cloud SaaS environments.
Image Credits: Spin technology
Spin works like a beefed-up antivirus program that scans SaaS apps using an algorithm and database of malicious apps and browser extensions. Dontov says the platform can detect ransomware across platforms including Google Workspace, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce, perform automatic risk assessments and backups, and allow users to create policies that dictate access controls.
To date, Spin, which claims to have more than 1,600 clients, has raised $18 million in venture capital. The startup’s success can be attributed in part to strong investor interest in the cybersecurity sector — interest that has proven (so far) robust against macroeconomic headwinds. Cybersecurity VC funding rose to a record $11.5 billion in 2021. And in the first half of 2022, it was touch $12.5 billion.
That’s not surprising. After all, the demand for cybersecurity products remains high. As my colleague Carly Page writes, ransomware attacks were responsible for an estimated 2.9 million attacks from January 2021 to August 2021, while supply chain attacks targeting SolarWinds and Kaseye quadrupled from 2020. Union, ENISA, has recently warned that traditional cybersecurity defenses are no longer effective in defending against these types of attacks.
Gartner estimates that companies will spend $172 billion on IT security in 2022.
“The future of work is now, but the security and backup appliance needed to support distributed work through SaaS apps has lagged behind the needs of the market, giving bad actors a wide variety of options for exploits” Blueprint Equity’s Sheldon Lewis said in a statement provided to londonbusinessblog.com. “Spin has stepped in and created an easy-to-use, foolproof security and backup solution that can deliver users of the largest SaaS productivity apps without the complexity of managing security protocols, the fear of ransomware defenses, or the cost of data storage. ”