Salt Security, the leading API security company, announced it has secured $70 million in Series C funding, led by Advent International, one of the largest and most experienced private equity investors, through Advent Tech, with participation from Alkeon Capital and DFJ Growth. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, S Capital VC, and Y Combinator also participated in the round. Salt will use the funds to expand its global operations across R&D, sales and marketing, and customer success.

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To date, Salt Security has raised $131 million, $120 million of it in the last year. In the past 12 months, Salt has driven 400% growth in revenue, 160% growth in employees, and 380% growth in the API traffic it secures. This latest infusion of capital cements the company’s lead in the API security market, with the most funding, the most customers, the fastest growth, the most application environments and ecosystem integrations supported, the most use cases enabled, and the longest time in market to ensure the most advanced ML and AI algorithms for API attack prevention.

As APIs have proliferated as part of digital transformation, cloud migration, and application acceleration initiatives, API security incidents have risen in tandem, as attackers realize APIs are fruitful and lucrative to target. According to the most recent Salt Security State of API Security Report, in 2020, Salt customers’ average monthly call volume increased 51% while malicious API traffic grew 211%. According to Gartner, Inc., “By 2022, API abuses will move from an infrequent to the most-frequent attack vector, resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications.”1

“APIs are at the heart of all our application innovation today,” said Mike Towers, CISO, Takeda Pharmaceuticals. “As attackers have turned their focus on APIs, we must ensure the data and services our APIs connect remain protected. In evaluating multiple solutions, we quickly saw the technical advantages of the Salt platform, and we also appreciate how Salt has partnered with us throughout this journey.”

Salt Security offers a unique approach to API security with its flagship solution, the Salt Security API Protection Platform. The big data engine and AI and ML at the heart of the Salt C-3A Context-based API Analysis Architecture automates the continuous discovery of APIs and exposed sensitive data, stops API attackers during their reconnaissance activities, and delivers remediation insights. Needing no agents, software changes, or inline code, the patented Salt platform deploys quickly, with no impact on application performance.

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“The rapid proliferation of APIs has dramatically altered the attack surface of applications, creating a major challenge for large enterprises since existing security mechanisms cannot protect against this new threat,” said Bryan Taylor, managing partner and head of Advent’s technology team in Palo Alto. “We continue to see API security incidents make the news headlines and cause significant reputational risk for companies. As we investigated the API security market, Salt stood out for its multi-year technical lead, significant customer traction and references, and talented team. We look forward to drawing on our deep experience in this sector to partner with Salt in this exciting new chapter.”

Salt Security continues to grow its sales capacity and increase investments in its channel operations. Anton Granic has joined the company as Vice President of Worldwide Sales. Granic, who came to Salt from Nutanix, is focused on global expansion and partner enablement as Salt Security enters its next phase of growth.

“Several recent high-profile API security incidents have forced organizations to recognize that their existing protections cannot prevent API attacks or handle the scale and complexity of today’s API-driven applications,” said Roey Eliyahu, CEO and co-founder of Salt Security. “This new round of funding will help us increase our rate of innovation and businesses in more regions securely adopt APIs to foster their own innovation.”