Backline, a brand new security startup that makes use of AI brokers to routinely remediate security vulnerabilities, is popping out of stealth with a $9 million seed spherical led by StageOne Ventures.
That is the third startup by Maor Goldberg, the corporate’s co-founder and CEO. He beforehand co-founded Whitebox Safety, which he bought to SailPoint in 2015, in addition to container security startup Apolicy, which was acquired by Sysdig in 2021. In 2024, he left Sysdig to start out Backline along with Eran Leib (chief buyer officer), and Aviad Chen (VP R&D).
The concept behind Backline is that builders and security groups are drowning in security alerts.
“The one factor we’ve seen continuously, nearly day-in, day-out, is that we as an trade drown giant organizations with issues,” Goldberg stated. “They purchase Sysdig, they purchase Wizz, they purchase Snyk — all of those nice corporations and nice names. Their job is to go to prospects and inform them the place they’ve issues. The truth is that these security groups are shopping for these instruments, however they’ll’t repair most of those issues.”
The security groups, in spite of everything, depend on engineers to repair vulnerabilities, for instance, or on platform engineering groups to repair misconfigurations.
“There’s all the time a necessity for security groups to go and chase another person within the group. And all of those groups, with out exception, simply don’t have the time,” he stated.
Backline can basically take notifications from all of those security instruments and begin remediating most of the points. The service’s AI brokers take a look at the vulnerability, create a proposal for find out how to repair it, implement the required modifications, after which take a look at them.
This testing step is essential, Backline says, and was impressed by the best way {hardware} groups use formal strategies to check their merchandise. This, Goldberg stated, is the one strategy to generate belief with potential customers.
To do that, the corporate makes use of off-the-shelf giant language fashions (LLMs). “All of our mental property is constructed round choosing up the place [the security scanning tools] left off. There’s a excessive precedence drawback that must be addressed. A variety of [this is about] excited about brokers, the way you collaborate collectively and the way you carry the correct individuals into the method,” Goldberg defined.
Backline’s ambitions transcend its present remediation of software program vulnerabilities. Trying forward, the corporate needs to sort out software program provide chain points like discovering uncovered secrets and techniques, fixing id and entry points, and static utility security testing.
“Safety backlogs at the moment are the primary factor holding CISOs up at night time,” stated Tal Slobodkin, managing accomplice at StageOne Ventures, and a backer of the founding group’s earlier startup. “Backline’s deep cybersecurity experience mixed with their imaginative and prescient for autonomous remediation current a approach out of the prioritization paradigm by means of a number of orders of magnitude enchancment in remediation velocity. We haven’t talked to a single group that claims to have their security backlog absolutely beneath management, which indicators simply how vital this chance is.”
Evolution Fairness Companions and Gradient additionally invested within the seed spherical.
