oak9 Secures $5.9 Million Seed Round To Launch Infrastructure-as-Code Security Platform

Chicago-based startup will help enterprises accelerate app delivery while providing comprehensive security

oak9 launched its infrastructure as code security platform, backed by a seed round of $5.9 million led by Menlo Ventures, accompanied by Hyde Park Angels and Uncorrelated Ventures. As part of the investment, Venky Ganesan, Partner at Menlo Ventures will join oak9’s board of directors along with Tim Tully, formerly CTO at Splunk and now Partner at Menlo Ventures.

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“Infrastructure as code has accelerated the velocity of modern development teams by 10X, beyond the ability of security teams to keep up”

The oak9 platform accelerates the delivery of cloud-native applications while providing comprehensive security. It seamlessly integrates into the software development lifecycle, analyzes infrastructure as code, and builds in security based on a holistic and comprehensive view of its architecture and components in their broader context. Continuous, dynamic monitoring maintains security not just within individual components, but across evolving ecosystems.

“Infrastructure as code has accelerated the velocity of modern development teams by 10X, beyond the ability of security teams to keep up,” said Tully. “The rate of change and the complexity of continuously evolving architectures mean that large organizations can typically secure less than 15% of their applications. By integrating security starting in the design phase of the software development lifecycle, the oak9 platform allows development teams to maintain their velocity while identifying and remediating security gaps, ultimately producing cloud-native applications that are secure and compliant by design.”

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Built into CI/CD workflows, the oak9 platform brings intelligent automation and seamless security to infrastructure as code. The platform’s pre-built security as code blueprints support any architecture on any cloud provider, and with automated design changes and continuous dynamic monitoring, the platform ensures security keeps up with evolving requirements and potential drift. Organizations gain a comprehensive view of security across the entire application architecture, not just individual configurations.

“Every day, businesses face a tradeoff: They can either wait for security or keep moving and accept the risk,” said Raj Datta, CEO of oak9. “oak9 was founded as a third option that supports both accelerated delivery and comprehensive security. We need to shift left even further than many organizations have considered to build security into product design. We need to go beyond just keywords and components to analyze security more comprehensively across the entire architecture. And we need continuous, dynamic monitoring to achieve ongoing security. This is exactly what we designed the oak9 platform to do.”

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