Astra Security Raises $2.7 Million to Enhance AI-Driven Cybersecurity Solutions

India-based Cybersecurity Firm Astra Security Raises $2.7 Million in Funding

Cybersecurity companies are responding to AI-based threats with AI-powered solutions. Security platform Astra Security raised $2.7 million in a growth capital round led by Emergent Ventures. Neon Fund, Better Capital, Blume Ventures, and PointOne Capital participated. The company said it will use the funds to drive AI-driven solutions. While AI is evolving rapidly, threat actors are using it to find loopholes, leading to more security breaches. Sikhil Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Astra, addressed the fact by saying, "The cybercrime landscape is becoming increasingly complex with AI-based attacks." He further said that traditional, periodic penetration testing is no longer sufficient in the current threat landscape. To stay ahead of cybercriminals, Astra Security is transitioning many businesses to continuous penetration testing. While the engineering sector has embraced agility, collaboration, and automation, the cybersecurity industry has fallen behind. Their mission is to revitalise the security domain by incorporating AI, adopting a hacker's perspective, and simplifying technology. Astra Security's pentest platform tries to simplify the chaotic penetration testing for organisations and defend from AI-based threats using its AI-powered offensive vulnerability scanning engine that emulates hacker behaviour to scan applications for 10,000+ security tests. The company, founded in 2018 by Sikhil Sharma and Ananda Krishna, has uncovered 2,000,000+ vulnerabilities for its customers, saving customers $69 million and more in potential losses due to security vulnerabilities involving companies like Loom, HackerRank, ITC, Olx Autos, Mamaearth, Muthoot Finance, University of Cambridge, CompTIA, and Prime Healthcare. The founders were hackers and builders who helped big brands like Microsoft, Adobe, AT&T, Yahoo, and Blackberry, which led them to create Astra Security. "Security is increasingly shifting to the hands of developers, while security teams find themselves more overwhelmed than ever," said Ananda Krishna, co-founder and CTO of Astra. So, with the funding, Astra Security aims to equip cybersecurity teams with sophisticated solutions to keep up with the demands of today's fast-evolving digital environments. To begin with, they plan to focus on their product OrbitX and expand the capabilities of their scanning engine, which will allow organisations to defend their digital infrastructures continuously in real time. They also plan to leverage AI to enhance automated and manual pen tests.

Astra Security Bags $2.7 Mn To Boost Cybersecurity Solutions

The startup's AI-powered platform tries to emulate a hacker's mind and suggest fixes to security engineers to secure their systems SaaS-based Cybersecurity platform Astra Security has secured $2.7 Mn (about INR 23.5 Cr) in a funding round led by Emergent Ventures, along with a host of other investors, including Neon Fund, Blume Ventures and PointOne Capital. Prior to this funding, the startup reportedly raised $120K (around INR 10.4 Lakh) as part of Techstars Accelerators programme. Talking to Inc42, Shikhil Sharma, founder and CEO, said that the fresh capital will be deployed in further developing its product offerings, hiring new teams in the US region and bolstering its AI-driven technology. "The new capital will help the organisation to expand its footprint into the US market where we are looking to hire new teams and in the next one year we are also looking to expand our offering into cloud security," Sharma said. According to a company statement, the Bengaluru-based startup is also looking to invest majorly in building AI-driven solutions that will help developers and engineers to build security detections. Founded in 2018 by Sharma and Ananda Krishna, Astra Security is a cybersecurity solutions company which enables engineering teams to perform continuous and scalable pentesting, (simulating cyberattacks to identify cybersecurity threats) for their systems and detect vulnerabilities. The startup offers testing for web applications, APIs, network security and more. The startup's AI-driven technology tries to emulate a hacker's mind and suggest fixes to security engineers to secure their systems. It claims to have performed more than 3000 testings and have discovered 2 Mn+ vulnerabilities in systems with an average of 30,000+ vulnerabilities discovered every month for their clients. The Blume Ventures-backed startup caters to multiple sectors such as healthcare, BFSI, and fintech along with others. Forty-five percent of the startup's client base lies in the US. It counts Mamaearth, Dream 11, Muthoot Finance along with others as its clients in India. In the Indian market the startup competes with the likes of TAC Security and globally it counts Pentera, Traceable AI along with others as its competition. According to a report, the global pentesting market is expected to become a $3.9 Bn opportunity by 2029 growing at a CAGR of 17.1% for the next four years.

Astra Security raises $2.7 million from Emergent Ventures, others

The company's offerings are used by over 800 engineering teams across more than 70 countries. It leverages AI to mimic hacker behavior, identifying vulnerabilities through rapid detections. Its suite of tools includes penetration testing as a service (PTaaS), a dynamic application security testing (DAST) vulnerability scanner and an application programming interface (API) security platform.

Astra raises $2.7M to simplify cybersecurity by mimicking hacker behavior with AI-powered solutions - SiliconANGLE

Astra raises $2.7M to simplify cybersecurity by mimicking hacker behavior with AI-powered solutions Astra Security, a cybersecurity startup specializing in artificial intelligence-driven penetration testing, today announced it has raised $2.7 million in early-stage funding to enhance its AI capabilities and expand its cloud offerings. Launched in 2018, Astra provides a platform that simplifies the cybersecurity process of penetration testing, or pentesting, which is the simulated process of attacking a computer network from the perspective of a malicious actor to discover vulnerabilities. With the advent of AI code generation and the increase of continuous delivery practices, more code is being shipped than ever before, along with those increasing lines of codes the "attack surface" for vulnerabilities and exploits to hide has also enlarged. AI has also become popular among hackers to probe for potential cracks in code. Astra uses AI to think like attackers. Last year, Astra's pentesting platform uncovered almost 5,500 vulnerabilities per day for its customers. The company said this number is expected to triple before the end of the year. "We're building Astra as a one-of-a-kind continuous pentest platform which emulates hacker behavior and performs AI-driven attacks just like a hacker does," said Shikhil Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Astra Security, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. "So across your web apps, APIs, cloud, we scan all your infrastructure for vulnerabilities, just like a hacker would." Traditional pentesting only happens periodically, such as yearly or quarterly, explained Sharma, and produces long-winded vulnerability reports about the system. A pentest is usually led by a team of human experts who attempt to penetrate the system to discover vulnerabilities from the outside by acting as malicious attackers in order to exploit the system. Astra differs in that it can be triggered at any time as pentest-as-a-service and its AI-powered scanners can be integrated directly into development lifecycle processes. That means it can be called upon whenever a new feature has gone live, during the delivery process, after a vendor update or any time there's a reason to believe something may have changed. "We built an underlying AI-powered 'offensive scanning engine,' as we call it," said Sharma. "The beauty of it is that it's able to very neatly correlate vulnerabilities across various targets. And of course, building detection rules for web apps and cloud APIs is super-easy with it, and now we are actually on to creating rules or detections also using AI, and eventually, we plan on giving that ability to our customers." The automated AI scanner triggers immediately but Astra also employs a team of security engineers to back up the AI threat engine. During the planning stage, the AI suggests offensive threat cases tailored for the scope of the pentest to ensure the best possible use of their time while the AI does the grunt work. Any vulnerabilities discovered by the cybersecurity experts, which weren't uncovered by the scanning engine, are quickly built as new detections and added as training for the AI. Sharma said this vulnerability discovery loop means that the AI-driven offensive scanning engine remains human expert-powered and gets continuously updated with numerous potential sources of exploits. The company also uses updates from publicly disclosed databases of security flaws and other sources, but very little beats actual hands-on training. When asked what AI models are used under the hood, Sharma said he couldn't reveal exactly which one but said, "It's one of the big ones." Astra doesn't skimp on the use of generative AI either: If developers want to fix a particularly bad vulnerability quickly, they have access to a chatbot called Astranaut. "It has context about the vulnerability being fixed and the technology stack of the customer, hence it is able to give actionable answers to questions," Sharma said. "Still, if developers need support from a security expert, they can comment under the vulnerability, and experts will reply within 24 to 48 hours. For Slack lovers, there's also a way to sync this entire conversation to Slack threads about each vulnerability." Last year, more than a quarter of Astra's customers were midsized and large organizations, including Loom Inc., Sunglass Hut, HackerRank, Mamaearth, the University of Cambridge, CompTIA and Prime Healthcare. The company's customer base comprises more than 800 engineering teams across more than 70 countries.