Cequence Security Raises $17M in Series B

Cequence Security, a provider of innovative application security solutions for today's hyper-connected enterprises, has secured $17M in Series B funding, bringing total funding for the company to $30M. The new round of funding is led by Dell Technologies Capital with additional participation from Shasta Ventures, which led the previous round of funding for the company. The new funding will fuel market expansion as well as continued platform innovations.

Cequence Security is focused on transforming the multi-billion dollar application security market with an open, container-based software platform that is easily deployed in the cloud or on premises, and integrates multiple security services. Each security module leverages the intelligence and automation of a patented, AI-powered analytics engine to protect organizations from a broad range of attacks – including business logic abuse, account fraud, and content scraping – that compromise the web, mobile, and API application services that connect their customers, partners, and suppliers.

"In today's digital economy, Internet-facing applications and APIs are a prime target for a broad range of sophisticated semantic and syntactic attacks," said Larry Link, President and CEO of Cequence Security. "We're delighted to have investment partners like Dell Technologies Capital and Shasta Ventures, who share our vision and mission to deliver continued innovations that protect the ever-growing number of hyper-connected organizations against these types of application attacks."

"The application security market is certainly ripe for transformation due to automation of business logic cyberattacks and expanding attack surface aided by exponentially-increasing usage of IaaS clouds, APIs and mobile apps. Cequence Security is well positioned to be a major disruptor," said Deepak Jeevankumar, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital. "Larry and his team transformed the network security market by leading the business team at Palo Alto Networks in the years of hyper-growth. We believe they can do the same to the application security market."

Nitin Chopra, a Partner at Shasta Ventures and investor in Cequence Security echoed that support. "I've had the pleasure of working with the Cequence team for a couple of years. Their passion for security innovation and commitment to customer satisfaction is evident every single day. We're excited about the next phase of the company's growth."

Cequence Security, named a 2018 Gartner Cool Vendor, has initially focused on stopping malicious automated bot attacks, which now account for nearly one-third of all Internet traffic, and are often undetectable by traditional security tools. One customer that has deployed the CQ botDefense solution is Smule, a leading provider of on-line music applications. "We needed a solution that would integrate into our environment and block all malicious bot traffic without any collateral damage to our customers," said Parker Ranney, VP of Operations at Smule. "We set the bar high because we owe that to our customers. The Cequence team worked closely with us to deploy a solution that has accomplished these security objectives."

CQ botDefense can be deployed both in private and public clouds, and supports modern proxies such as Envoy, HA-Proxy, NGINX in addition to traditional enterprise load balancers.

With the Series B funding, Cequence Security will build on the success of CQ botDefense and its platform strategy, and will accelerate delivery of additional security service modules, and expand sales and marketing reach across the US and selected international markets.

About Dell Technologies Capital

Dell Technologies Capital is the investment arm for Dell Technologies. We've invested in over 100 companies that push the envelope on digital technology for enterprises and consumers. We are a team of world-class investors who help our companies succeed. We focus on early-stage investments with passionate founders. Our companies gain unique access to the go-to-market capabilities of Dell Technologies (Dell EMC, RSA, VMWare, Pivotal, Virtustream, Secureworks). Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Dell Technologies Capital has offices in Boston, Austin, and Israel. For more information visit www.delltechcapital.com.

About Shasta Ventures

Shasta Ventures is a leading early-stage venture capital firm partnering with bold, creative entrepreneurs who are passionate about building epic products and amazing experiences. Founded in 2004, Shasta has more than $1 billion under management investing in enterprise and consumer companies with a deep focus on emerging platforms. To combat security threats on today's computing architectures, Shasta backs world-class teams building breakout products and technologies in each sub-segment of security. Shasta has invested in more than 100 companies including Anaplan, Apptio, Dollar Shave Club, Mint, Nest, Zuora and many promising private companies such as Deep Sentinel, Leanplum, Nextdoor, Smule, Turo and Valimail. www.shastaventures.com

About Cequence Security

Cequence Security delivers a game-changing application security platform for today's hyper-connected organizations that rely on web, mobile, and API application services to support business processes and enable customer engagements. The platform leverages an AI-powered analytics engine to consolidate multiple functions that strengthen the security posture of these organizations against a broad range of application attacks. The automation within the analytics engine also improves the productivity and efficiency of IT resources. Cequence's management team includes Larry Link, CEO, Ameya Talwalkar, CPO and Shreyans Mehta, CTO. Larry led the worldwide sales team for Palo Alto Networks from 2007 to 2012. Ameya and Shreyans led the development of Symantec's anti-malware platform. The company is venture-backed and headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA. Learn more at www.cequence.ai.