Backline, a brand new safety startup that makes use of AI brokers to mechanically remediate safety vulnerabilities, is popping out of stealth with a $9 million seed spherical led by StageOne Ventures.
That is the third startup by Maor Goldberg, the corporate’s co-founder and CEO. He beforehand co-founded Whitebox Safety, which he bought to SailPoint in 2015, in addition to container safety startup Apolicy, which was acquired by Sysdig in 2021. In 2024, he left Sysdig to begin Backline along with Eran Leib (chief buyer officer), and Aviad Chen (VP R&D).
The thought behind Backline is that builders and safety groups are drowning in safety alerts.
“The one thing we’ve seen constantly, almost day-in, day-out, is that we as an industry drown large organizations with problems,” Goldberg stated. “They buy Sysdig, they buy Wizz, they buy Snyk — all of these great companies and great names. Their job is to go to customers and tell them where they have problems. The reality is that these security teams are buying these tools, but they can’t fix most of these problems.”
The safety groups, in any case, depend on engineers to repair vulnerabilities, for instance, or on platform engineering groups to repair misconfigurations.
“There’s always a need for security teams to go and chase someone else in the organization. And all of these teams, without exception, just don’t have the time,” he stated.
Backline can primarily take notifications from all of those safety instruments and begin remediating most of the points. The service’s AI brokers have a look at the vulnerability, create a proposal for easy methods to repair it, implement the mandatory adjustments, after which take a look at them.
This testing step is essential, Backline says, and was impressed by the way in which {hardware} groups use formal strategies to check their merchandise. This, Goldberg stated, is the one solution to generate belief with potential customers.
To do that, the corporate makes use of off-the-shelf massive language fashions (LLMs). “All of our intellectual property is built around picking up where [the security scanning tools] left off. There is a high priority problem that needs to be addressed. A lot of [this is about] thinking about agents, how you collaborate together and how you bring the right people into the process,” Goldberg defined.
Backline’s ambitions transcend its present remediation of software program vulnerabilities. Trying forward, the corporate needs to deal with software program provide chain points like discovering uncovered secrets and techniques, fixing id and entry points, and static software safety testing.
“Security backlogs are now the number one thing keeping CISOs up at night,” stated Tal Slobodkin, managing associate at StageOne Ventures, and a backer of the founding workforce’s earlier startup. “Backline’s deep cybersecurity expertise combined with their vision for autonomous remediation present a way out of the prioritization paradigm through multiple orders of magnitude improvement in remediation velocity. We haven’t talked to a single organization that claims to have their security backlog fully under control, which signals just how significant this opportunity is.”
Evolution Fairness Companions and Gradient additionally invested within the seed spherical.
