Clover Security Raises $36M to Deploy AI Agents for Automated Product Security

Exclusive: Wiz founders back AI security agent startup in $36M round

Why it matters: AI security startups need big names and major name recognition to gain traction in an increasingly crowded cybersecurity market. Driving the news: Clover Security unveiled the new funding, led by Notable Capital and Team8, this morning in an announcement shared exclusively with Axios. * Started in 2023, Clover Security provides agentic tools that help companies embed security throughout their products and ensure they remain secure during their lifecycle. The big picture: Most companies approach security as an afterthought once they've built their latest software or product, co-founder and CEO Alon Kollmann told Axios. That's left companies exposed to a deluge of security vulnerabilities. Zoom in: Think of Clover as an automated product security engineer, Kollmann said. * Clover plugs AI agents into developer platforms, like GitHub, Cursor and Slack, to predict and automatically detect security flaws in the tools employees are building. * After learning about the environment, Clover can then be used to conduct regular design, security and architectural reviews of the software and products. Yes, but: Customers decide how best to use Clover, including what internal data sources it can use and more. The intrigue: Clover already counts dozens of companies across the banking, enterprise technology and fintech sectors, including Fortune 500 companies, as customers. * Customers include edtech company Udemy, insurer Lemonade and fintech servicer Plaid. What's next: Over the next year, Kollman wants to double Clover's headcount, which is currently around 40 employees. * "We want to grow very quickly to meet the demand we're seeing," he said. "There's crazy potential to build something really big here." Go deeper: The age of AI-powered cyberattacks is here

Prominent tech executives back $36M round for cybersecurity startup Clover Security - SiliconANGLE

Prominent tech executives back $36M round for cybersecurity startup Clover Security Clover Security Ltd., a startup focused on helping developers fix software vulnerabilities, launched today with $36 million in funding. Notable Capital and Team8 led the round. They were joined by more than a half dozen other investors including Wiz Inc. co-founders Assaf Rappaport and Yinon Costica, cybersecurity entrepreneur Shlomo Kramer and executives from several publicly traded tech firms. Some enterprise applications are updated multiple times per week. As a result, manually scanning every code change for potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities can be prohibitively time-consuming. Tel Aviv-based Clover Security has developed a platform that uses artificial intelligence agents to automate the task. "Teams are moving faster and building more than ever," said Clover co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Alon Kollmann (pictured, right, with co-founder Or Chen). "Security teams are left alone to manage unprecedented complexity. Clover changes that by helping product security teams scale by working where products start, in design." Clover finds cybersecurity gaps by collecting data from the tools a software team uses to build applications. If the platform encounters knowledge gaps, it asks developers to manually upload additional information. Clover uses the data it collects to map out a company's cybersecurity policies and find application updates that don't comply with them. The platform scans updates before they're released to prevent vulnerabilities from rolling out to production. According to Clover, its AI can detect if an application change contains a known exploit or lacks essential cybersecurity guardrails. The platform can, for example, identify database implementations that don't encrypt records at rest. Clover prioritizes cybersecurity issues based on their severity. The platform takes into account factors such as the number of users affected by a vulnerability and the sensitivity of the application in which the flaw was detected. According to Clover, that prioritization helps companies ensure their cybersecurity teams fix the most urgent issues first. The platform generates remediation suggestions to speed up the debugging process. According to Clover, companies can customize the generated advice to align it with their internal policies. For example, an enterprise could have Clover recommend that developers implement a specific encryption algorithm in components that store customer data. The platform includes a set of features focused specifically on AI security. Clover can identify what AI programming tools are used by a development team and prevent them from implementing insecure code. Additionally, the platform searches applications that use large language models for common AI vulnerabilities.