Exclusive: Wiz founders back AI product security agent startup
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Clover Security has nabbed $36 million in funding from a slew of high-profile industry stalwarts, including Wiz co-founders Assaf Rappaport and Yinon Costica and executives from Cato Networks, Snyk, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Atlassian and Google.
Why it matters: AI security startups need big names and major name recognition to gain traction in an increasingly crowded cybersecurity market.
Driving the news: Clover Security unveiled the new funding, led by Notable Capital and Team8, this morning in an announcement shared exclusively with Axios.
- Started in 2023, Clover Security provides agentic tools that help companies embed security throughout their products and ensure they remain secure during their lifecycle.
The big picture: Most companies approach security as an afterthought once they've built their latest software or product, co-founder and CEO Alon Kollmann told Axios. That's left companies exposed to a deluge of security vulnerabilities.
Zoom in: Think of Clover as an automated product security engineer, Kollmann said.
- Clover plugs AI agents into developer platforms, like GitHub, Cursor and Slack, to predict and automatically detect security flaws in the tools employees are building.
- After learning about the environment, Clover can then be used to conduct regular design, security and architectural reviews of the software and products.
Yes, but: Customers decide how best to use Clover, including what internal data sources it can use and more.
The intrigue: Clover already counts dozens of companies across the banking, enterprise technology and fintech sectors, including Fortune 500 companies, as customers.
- Customers include edtech company Udemy, insurer Lemonade and fintech servicer Plaid.
What's next: Over the next year, Kollmann wants to double Clover's headcount, which is currently around 40 employees.
- "We want to grow very quickly to meet the demand we're seeing," he said. "There's crazy potential to build something really big here."
Go deeper: The age of AI-powered cyberattacks is here
