Runa Capital Invests $500K Into A Security Platform Built By Ex-White Hackers

Who would you like to build a startup which could address the massive amounts of security attacks apps and sites get these days? A bunch of standard grade IT people? Or a team of ex-white hackers that previously helped Russian companies like Mail.ru, Yandex, and Parallels to block security threats? I know I’d prefer the former. This was a factor which was probably on the mind of Moscow-based Runa Capital, given that today it is making a $500,000 seed investment into Wallarm a “next gen” web security solution to protect online businesses from application level hacker attacks.

Alongside this news, Wallarm is releasing its first product. Runa’s investment director Dmitry Galperin will join the Wallarm board.

The cash will go into developing the company which is switching from a service model to a product business model, and partnering with managed service providers, public and private clouds, PaaS/IaaS, monitoring and log management systems, cloud IPS/IDS services. The security and vulnerability management market is worth an estimated $4 billion, (according to IDC).

The Wallarm team was previously in the info sec space since 2009 providing security audits as white hackers to a dozen of large businesses in the U.S. and Europe.

Ivan Novikov, CEO and co-founder of Wallarm says they have “built a product for customers operating large user base and processing huge amount of data.” And Runa’s investment director Dmitry Galperin says “this is where most WAFs traditionally fail, so web security is a really hot market with lots of new challenges.”

Playing in this space are existing companies including Imperva and Trustwave, but also Qualys and the open source platform Modsecurity. But Wallarm says its advantages compared to other platforms are that the platform is smart and “learns” from application and user behaviour. It can also protect from 0days attacks and vulnerabilities; doesn’t overload the security team with tons of info; shows only attacks that represent a real threat; works with very high load projects as it is built on top of nginx and is easy to install as there is no custom configuration. Wallarm vulnerability detection supports Ruby, PHP, .NET, Perl, Python and other popular web platforms and integrates with most popular bug trackers.

They say it especially fits companies that adopted continuous integration (CI) which introduce and deploy code updates daily.

Runa Capital’s investments announced to date include: Nginx, Jelastic, Ecwid, Zopa, LinguaLeo, BigTime Software, Capptain, Mambu, Rocketbank, Infratel and Dnevnik.ru amongst others.