AppOmni raises $70 million to secure organizations’ SaaS apps

Yesterday, software-as-a-service (SaaS) security provider AppOmni announced that it has raised $70 million in a Series C funding round that the company plans to use to accelerate its product development. This funding round brings AppOmni’s total funding to $123 million.

As a solution, AppOmni provides organizations with a security management tool that enables users to discover and monitor SaaS apps across their environment, spot security vulnerabilities, and provide guidance on remediating misconfigurations.

AppOmni’s approach gives security teams more visibility into the data stored in SaaS apps and the overall protection of those apps. It also provides additional controls such as internal staff provisioning, configuration management, permission sets, and guest user access to mitigate risks in the environment.

Securing the web of modern SaaS apps

The announcement comes as adoption of SaaS solutions has grown to the point where the average organization uses 254 different SaaS apps.

Given that employees use a web of SaaS apps to store and process critical data in the cloud, these services are a prime target for attackers that many organizations overlook.

In fact, research shows that 40% of all SaaS assets are unmanaged and provide internal, external, and public data access. With such massive amounts of data being processed via SaaS apps, companies cannot afford to overlook securing these environments – which is becoming increasingly important to prevent security incidents.

“SaaS applications have become an important part of the enterprise tech stack, with midsize and large enterprises using dozens or hundreds of different vendors,” said Brendan O’Connor, CEO of AppOmni. “But there is no standardization between SaaS apps when it comes to security configurations or architectures, making it difficult for security teams to maintain an optimal security posture across so many different apps.”

According to O’Connor, AppOmni addresses these challenges by giving security teams more visibility into their SaaS environments, automating tedious manual security processes to manage those apps, and providing recommended mitigations for users.

The providers who want to secure the SaaS market

With the SaaS market valued at $113.82 billion in 2020 and expected to grow to $716.52 billion in 2028, it is likely that more organizations will recognize the need to secure the attack surface.

AppOmni claims to be one of the top providers taking on this challenge, currently used by more than 78 million users and securing more than 230 million exposed records.

However, it competes with some fast-growing competitors. One of the company’s main competitors is Obsidian Security, a SaaS security and posture management and cloud detection and response provider.

Obsidian’s solution enables organizations to monitor cloud application accounts, permissions, configurations and activity to provide security teams with visibility into risks across the cloud environment.

Earlier this year, Obsidian announced that it had raised $90 million in a Series C funding round, bringing its total funding to $119.5 million.

Another competitor is Arctic Wolf, which offers a cloud detection and response solution that monitors SaaS and SaaS services to detect phishing credentials, impossible trips, and malicious integrations, while offering managed suspicious activity investigations to mitigate risks in to mitigate the cloud.

Last year, Arctic Wolf raised $150 million in a Series F funding round and achieved a valuation of $4.3 billion.

However, O’Connor argues that what sets AppOmni apart from other competitors is that “it doesn’t go any deeper than basic configuration management.” Instead, he suggests that a SaaS security program requires comprehensive security architecture, continuous monitoring, threat detection, automated workflows, and DevSecOps, which AppOmni provides.