Astra Security, a security platform, has raised $2.7 million in a growth capital round led by Emergent Ventures. The Neon Fund, Better Capital, Blume Ventures, and PointOne Capital also participated.
In 2018, the Delhi-based business raised $120,000 in a seed round from Techstars and other investors.
According to a press release from Astra, the new funding will be used to speed up development, improve capabilities to find vulnerabilities in cloud environments, and intensify its focus on leveraging AI to help developers and security engineers create security detections.
Astra Security, a cybersecurity SaaS company co-founded in 2018 by Shikhil Sharma and Ananda Krishna, uses its Pentest Platform to streamline otherwise disorganized penetration testing. Applications are scanned for more than 10,000 security tests using the company’s AI-powered offensive vulnerability scanning engine, which mimics hacker behavior. The platform’s CI/CD integrations enable companies to move from DevOps to DevSecOps and quickly fix vulnerabilities.
With its AI-powered pentest platform, Astra reported last year that it found almost 5,500 vulnerabilities every day for its clients. By year’s end, this figure is predicted to have tripled. Loom, HackerRank, ITC, Olx Autos, Mamaearth, Muthoot Finance, Bonusly, Singapore Trade Exchange, Oscilar, the University of Cambridge, CompTIA, and Prime Healthcare were among the mid-sized and large businesses that accounted for over 25% of its clientele.
According to Astra, its AI-powered platform, which continuously imitates hacker behavior to check applications for vulnerabilities through quick detections, is used by more than 800 engineering teams in more than 70 countries. This comprises an API Security Platform, a DAST vulnerability scanner, and PTaaS (Penetration Testing as a Service), which collectively identify more than 13,000 vulnerabilities.
Astra saved its customers over $69 million in potential losses from security threats last year by assisting them in identifying and prioritizing the remediation of over two million vulnerabilities.
