FireTail raises $5 million in early-stage financing

FireTail has closed $5 million in early-stage financing, which included contributions from Paladin Capital Group and high-profile cybersecurity executives.

Paladin Capital Group led the financing, and participating were Zscaler, General Advance, Secure Octane and cyber execs, including Ely Kahn, Cloud Security Vice President at SentinelOne, Mark Arena, CEO at Intel 471, and Josh Lospinoso, CEO at Shift5.

FireTail notes that application programming interfaces (APIs) are central to using modern digital applications and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The company elaborates that this is because APIs allow multiple systems to communicate with each other.

Further, FireTail says studies show more than 80% of all internet traffic comes from APIs, indicating that the volume of sensitive data being accessed and transmitted through these important interfaces is increasing substantially.

FireTail affords organisations continuous visibility over their APIs, threat monitoring and breach prevention using a unique, end-to-end focus on the application layer of cloud-native applications.

The company works with various early adopters throughout North America, Asia Pacific and Europe, securing hundreds of APIs and observing millions of events.

FireTail is helping early-access customers to build a fast and robust API inventory to find and eliminate API security issues.

"FireTail is taking a unique approach that makes it easy to embed robust security protection natively within the API itself, rather than trying to adapt legacy network security methods to APIs," says Mourad Yesayan, Managing Director at Paladin and FireTail Board Member.

"We're thrilled to be partnering with FireTail to bring its technology to developers and enterprises alike."

Jeremy Snyder and Riley Priddle co-founded FireTail, assuming the roles of CEO and Chief Technology Officer, respectively.

Snyder has decades of experience as a former cyber and IT practitioner, as well as C-Suite experience in customer-facing roles at companies including AWS, Rapid7, DivvyCloud and TRADOS.

Priddle is a technical leader with experience at SkyTV and HP.

The pair launched FireTail with a vision to prevent API-based data breaches.

"Fundamentally, the root causes of API data breaches are application logic problems," Snyder says.

"Our library makes it easy to execute inline, preventative checks against the main attack vectors.

"This funding will help us expand coverage to multiple code languages, cloud platforms, and geographically.

"We also have new initiatives we're developing together with our customers to provide true end-to-end API security.

"We'll wrap up implementation cycles with this cohort early next year, and look forward to doubling the size of the cohort in early 2023."