Modern businesses can choose from hundreds of apps and services available to protect their networks, data and assets. It helps you manage all the alerts and additional work that these security apps generate. But what if you could build your own apps customized to suit your own workloads to simplify the entire game?
This is the premise of a new Israeli startup called Sola. Sola has built a low/no-code platform to allow users to design their own cybersecurity apps for their specific needs, including tools to manage apps they already use. Sora is armed with $30 million in seed funding from today's stealth, and is hitting the ground with the goal of “democratizing” the way security approaches and dealing with it.
“We're not trying to be like another next-generation CPSM, or ASPM,” co-founder Guy Flechter said, referring to the posture management tool. We want to change the way you think about security. Just as Stripe did with payment, or Canva did with design. ”
S Capital (the company founded by the team that launched Sequoia Israel) and former longtime Sequoia VC Mike Moritz are co-leading the round, featuring with32, Glilot Capital Partners and unknown angel investors. (Sora has been around for about a year now, and some of the details of this round are still in work and the company has yet to disclose any details about the product.)
Sora is the creator of two longtime players in the world of cybersecurity, and her experience effectively booking the challenge. Flechter is the builder who previously co-founded and led application security expert Cider Security, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $300 million in 2022. His co-founder, Ron Peled, was previously the chief director of AI Commerce Company LivePerson.
As Flechter explains, there are basically two options to solve recent security challenges these days.
Option 1 is to buy a very robust commercial solution for the price tags that are usually found in six numbers. “This is a very complicated solution and at the end of the day you probably won't use everything you paid for,” he said.
Option 2 is to build your own solution using open source components. “It takes a very high level of technical expertise to put it together,” he said.
Sola's approach is effectively a swing when creating a new option 3.
Using AI and big data management to leverage modern innovation, the platform is designed for organizations that may be used by people who don't have large security teams and don't have extensive technical skills.
It provides an interface in Sola that allows users to set goals and ask questions in natural language, identifying what they are aiming to attract and track data from a variety of sources, and creating new “apps” that work with the company's specific assets.
Sola can be used to query data within existing security apps used, says Flechter, but security tools are also built in to replace certain features. Sola also has “pre-made” apps for those who don't want to put together their own apps.
The goal is to create a more streamlined security service for your organization. Theoretically, do exactly what they want and do just a small portion of the price.
The apps currently in the App Gallery are thinking about what features Sola can handle. For example, when using the AWS Network Security app, users will “get a high-level summary of Key AWS Network Security metrics that contain potential vulnerabilities.”
Some of the types of questions that help answer are: “What security groups have rules that security groups have excessively tolerant rules?” “What network protocols are enabled in my entire environment?” “Are there any unsecured open ports that can expose critical services?” “What is the status of the VPC flow log?”
There are dozens more pre-written apps to cover other cloud environments, developer environments such as GitHub, and key security tools such as Okta and Wiz.
In particular, Moritz is making his first investment here at a security startup in his abilities as a solo investor. He said what stood out for him was that the Sora team is leaning towards a big trend of building a bigger front-end behind the scenes of the back-end and more complex work is done to make it possible by leveraging innovation and making it possible. This is a pattern seen previously in areas such as striped payments, design with camber, and many other huge tech companies today. But his words remind us that this is all an ongoing work.
“It's clear that Sora will take advantage of all the advancements he is taking on in the evolution of AI. That's very obvious with that product,” he said in an interview. “When you look at Sola's interface today compared to where it was 18 months ago, it's been a lot better thanks to the improvements and breakthroughs announced and announced over the past 18 months.”