Endor Labs announced a strategic investment from Citi Ventures. This comes less than a year after the company received $70M in oversubscribed Series A financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP), Coatue, Dell Technologies Capital, Section 32 and more than 30 industry-leading CEOs, CISOs and CTOs.
Endor Labs was founded in 2022 by industry veterans and serial entrepreneurs Varun Badhwar and Dimitri Stiliadis to solve a massive yet largely neglected market need in application security. With the goal of shipping products faster, development teams rely on more and more dependencies as they develop their applications. These dependencies include Open Source Software (OSS), LLMs, containers, code repositories and arbitrary tools in CI/CD pipelines, which can introduce risks that development and security teams have no visibility into.
Today, application security teams spend countless hours investigating which risks should be prioritized, while developers drown in waves of uncontextualized security alerts. Endor Labs surfaces meaningful, reachable risks across dependencies in the software development lifecycle, helping teams get the evidence they need to fix only what matters.
Since its inception, Endor Labs has quickly gained traction with Fortune 500 enterprises as well as emerging cloud-native companies. Endor Labs was named a finalist at the 2023 RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox and 2023 Black Hat Startup Spotlight, a SINET16 Innovator Award Winner, and has been cited several times as one of the Best Places to Work.
“Financial institutions employ tens of thousands of developers, and often outpace technology companies with innovation and shipping new applications,” said Endor Labs CEO and co-founder, Varun Badhwar. “Software supply chain security is now a board-level concern for these organizations, because ignoring it or getting it wrong not only exposes the organization to significant risk, but costs hundreds of millions in lost developer productivity. Endor Labs already serves some of the largest financial institutions in the US, and our work with Citi gives us even better insights into how to solve problems at this scale.”
Citi Ventures, which has a presence in regions ranging from Palo Alto to Singapore and Tel Aviv, invests in the category-defining startups helping revolutionize financial services.
"Citi runs one of the largest software development organizations in the world,” said Clark Smith, Head of Engineering and Architecture for CISO & Managing Director at Citi. “At this scale, lost productivity due to false positive alerts is a compounding issue. Endor Labs integrates seamlessly into the developer workflow and helps pinpoint supply chain risks that may affect our business.”
“Endor Labs represents the next major innovation in application security,” said Matt Carbonara, Head of Enterprise Tech Investing at Citi Ventures. “Their platform represents a technological step change in how vulnerabilities are analyzed. For a long time now, developers have had to manually analyze vulnerabilities to assess if they are exercised in production. We believe that the reachability analysis provided by Endor Labs will be a must-have technology for enterprises, focusing developers’ efforts on only the most critical and reachable vulnerabilities and saving them countless hours. We’re extremely excited to become investors and partner with Varun and team.”
