Wallarm, a cybersecurity startup with Russian roots, announced yesterday the completion of a $8 million round in California. The round was led by Toba Capital with participation from Partech Ventures and Gagarin Capital (which had invested in the company’s previous round) and Y Combinator (from which Wallarm graduated in 2016).
“Given the growing sophistication of hackers and the influx of cyber attacks targeted at organizations managing sensitive data, investing in Wallarm was a no-brainer,” stated Toba Capital founder Vinny Smith.
The amount raised may seem unusually modest in today’s Silicon Valley, CrunchBase journalist Jason Rowley noted: “Instead of raising and torching countless millions in VC money in the name of moving fast and breaking budgets, Wellarm took its time to mature into an actual business, which is a lot more than one can say about many companies in the Bay Area.”
“We’ve decided to only raise what we need and fund the rest of our growth organically,” the startup’s founder Ivan Novikov was quoted as saying.
A Russian-American success story
A resident of Skolkovo, the Russian international tech hub under completion, Wallarm has developed “a complete solution for blocking attacks and detecting vulnerabilities for modern web applications and APIs.” Its technology combines a new-generation web application firewall and a vulnerability scanner in one unified product.
“From the early days, Wallarm’s differentiation has been its ability to defend applications from real attacks, rather than checking for compliance with irrelevant security guidelines,” said Novikov in an exchange with the Skolkovo news portal Sk.ru.
“This year we reaffirmed this strategy once again by launching our Framework for Automatic Security Testing (Wallarm FAST). The new funding will be used to take this new product to market, invest further into the growth of our AppSec Platform product line, and service our growing contingent of Fortune 1000 customers,” he added.
Built on top of Nginx, a popular open source platform, 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.
Wallarm 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.
In 2013, Wallarm secured $500,000 in equity funding from Runa Capital, an international venture fund with Russian roots. In 2016, the company received a grant of 5 million rubles ($76,000) from the Skolkovo Foundation, after winning the foundation’s iSecurity competition.
That same year, Wallarm received $120,000 from Y Combinator and raised $2.3 million from Gagarin Capital, Partech Ventures and unnamed individual investors.
Earlier this year, the startup was ranked seventh in the security category in Inc. 5000, a ranking of America’s fastest-growing private companies published by Inc. Magazine.
