Wallarm, a cybersecurity startup with Russian roots, has just secured $2.3 million in equity funding. The round involved Gagarin Capital — an investment firm which is particularly active in Eastern Europe, having backed MSQRD and Prisma, — Partech Ventures and unnamed individual investors.
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 vulnerability scanner in one unified product.
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.
Among Wallarm’s customers are Automatic, Parallels, Ulmart, Wargaming and Yandex, as well as several banks and payment systems.
“It’s very important for us not to stop at the level we have reached so far but to keep going, and that’s why we decided to attract external investment in the company, despite its profitability,” said Ivan Novikov, CEO of Wallarm, in a exchange with the Skolkovo news portal Sk.ru.
“To develop on the US market, we will need to set up a new, local team, and that will entail considerable expenses. We came to Silicon Valley not to play, but to win, and that’s far from easy in such a competitive environment,” the entrepreneur added.
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.
Back in 2013, Wallarm secured $500,000 in equity funding from Runa Capital, an international venture fund with Russian roots. Earlier this year, the company received a grant of 5 million rubles ($76,000) from the Skolkovo Foundation, after winning the foundation’s iSecurity competition.
This past summer, Wallarm graduated from Y Combinator’s S16 batch, receiving $120,000 from the US accelerator.
Sources: Skolkovo Foundation, Firrma.ru
