Spin Technology raises $16M to protect SaaS apps against attacks – TechCrunch

Spin Technology, a data protection software vendor catering to enterprise clientele, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A round led by Blueprint Equity with participation from Santa Barbara Venture Partners and Blu Venture Investors. CEO Dmitry Dontov said that fresh capital — which values Spin at $55 million post-money — will be put toward supporting growth, expanding Spin’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, and growing the startup’s marketing, sales and engineering teams.

Most firms leverage third-party apps to extend their cloud SaaS environments. In fact, companies today use 89 SaaS apps on average, up 24% since 2016, according to Okta. But while these apps help offload the work normally done by internal teams, they can expose organizations to attack. For example, third-party apps can ship with misconfigured guest account functionality, integrations and connections that lead to data breaches.

Seeking to tackle the problem, Dontov co-founded Palo Alto-based Spin in 2017. A three-time entrepreneur, Dontov says he was inspired to develop a platform that uses AI to detect “shadow IT” activities in cloud SaaS environments.

Image Credits: Spin Technology

Spin acts like a kind of souped-up antivirus program, scanning SaaS apps using an algorithm and database of malicious apps and browser extensions. Dontov says that the platform can detect ransomware across platforms including Google Workspace, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce, performing automatic risk assessments and backups and allowing users to create policies that dictate access management.

To date, Spin, which claims to have more than 1,600 customers, has raised $18 million in venture capital. The startup’s success can be partially attributed to strong investor interest in the cybersecurity sector — interest that has proven robust to macroeconomic headwinds (so far). Cybersecurity VC funding surged to a record $11.5 billion in 2021. And in the first half of 2022, it hit $12.5 billion.

That’s not surprising. Demand for cybersecurity products remains high, after all. As my colleague Carly Page writes, ransomware attacks accounted for an estimated 2.9 million attacks from January 2021 to August 2021, while supply-chain attacks that targeted SolarWinds and Kaseye increased fourfold over 2020. The European Union’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, recently warned that traditional cybersecurity protections are no longer effective in defending against these types of attacks.

Gartner estimates that companies will spend $172 billion on IT security in 2022.

“The future of work is now, but the security and backup apparatus needed to support distributed work through SaaS apps has lagged the needs of the market, giving bad actors a broad range of options for exploits,” Blueprint Equity’s Sheldon Lewis said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “Spin has stepped in and created a simple-to-use, enterprise-strength security and backup solution that delivers for users of the largest SaaS productivity apps, without the complexity of managing security protocols, the anxiety of defending against ransomware, or the costs of data storage.”