Runa Capital, a $135 million venture fund with offices in Moscow and California, has just announced an investment in Wallarm, a startup with Russian origins that develops solutions to protect online businesses from application-level attacks by hackers.
The exact amount of the capital injection has not been disclosed. Runa’s PR Director Liliana Pertenava only said to East-West Digital News that it was “less than 1 million dollars.” She also declined to disclose the startup’s valuation.
The company was founded back in 2009 by a group of Russian white hat hackers who previously helped several big companies like Mail.ru, Yandex, and Parallels analyze web site security threats.
Coming up with to the idea of creating their own products, the white hat hackers became entrepreneurs and launched a small but global business. The Wallarm trademark was registered recently to help commercialize the group‘s products.
The company is incorporated in Delaware in the United States but most of the team is working remotely in different countries, from the US to Australia, Germany, Latvia, and Russia, Pertenava indicated.
Wallarm’s offerings are intended for companies that have adopted continuous integration (CI), introducing and deploying code updates daily, sometimes together with new vulnerabilities. Such companies need to have a continuous process in place for keeping their security up-to-date. These are the needs addressed by Wallarm.
In comparison to such established competitors as Imperva and Trustwave, Wallarm claims to better identify and eliminate the vulnerabilities that are the most threatening to a business. The company’s solution excels in protecting businesses from as yet unknown types of attacks – known as 0days attacks – “without overloading security teams with tons of excessive information,” said Pertenava.
Built on top of Nginx – a popular open source security platform in which Runa has also invested – Wallarm’s solutions work with very high load projects. No custom configuration is required due to a built-in machine learning engine, which “learns” from application and user behavior.
