API security is all the rage these days, pushed into the limelight following a spate of high-profile security incidents that saw reams of user data exposed or exfiltrated. Peloton spilled users’ private account information; Experian exposed the financial histories of millions of Americans; and Facebook, LinkedIn and Clubhouse all had user data scraped en masse because of their poorly secured APIs.
For companies like Noname Security that aim to solve API security problems, business is booming. The Palo Alto-headquartered company today announced it’s raised $135 million in Series C funding, pushing the startup over the $1 billion valuation mark, making it the latest startup to join the cybersecurity unicorn club.
The round was led by Georgian and Lightspeed, with participation from Insight Partners, Forgepoint and others. The funding comes just six months after Noname closed a $60 million round of funding at Series B, less than a year after raising $25 million at Series A after emerging from stealth last December. For those keeping count, that’s $220 million raised by the company to date.
Noname helps companies proactively discover and remediate API security issues by analyzing configuration settings, network traffic and code to prevent misuse. APIs, in simple terms, allow two or more things to talk to each other over the internet, including hardware and software. APIs are pretty much everywhere, even if you can’t see them. But without controls in place, APIs can be abused to siphon off tons of sensitive or private internal data from a company’s servers.
The startup said it plans to use the new investment to expand its research and development, and improve its go-to-market strategy. Noname now claims to support one-fifth of Fortune 500 companies, and has tripled its headcount in the past six months to more than 200 employees.