Otterize Makes a Raise and Snyk Makes More Cutbacks

SNYK Facebook pic

Otterize, an Israeli startup offering an open-source solution to connect services securely, to each other and to their infrastructures, raised $11.5 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures, followed by Dig Ventures, Vine Ventures, with participation by Jibe Ventures, Crew Capital, and Operator Partners. Otterize also publicly unveiled its new Otterize Cloud product, which is now in GA. Meanwhile, Snyk, an Israeli cybersecurity startup in the field of cloud native application security, continues to contract making another 128 layoffs.

The financing round included angel investors like Caleb Sima, former CSO at Robinhood, Michael Shaulov, CEO of Fireblocks, Nadir Izrael, CTO of Armis, Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk, Tamar Yehoshua, former CPO of Slack and Yevgeny Dibrov, CEO of Armis.

The Otterize open source + cloud product launches at a time when a growing distributed workforce demands more self-serve solutions, particularly those that allow rapid development without coordinating between client and server teams. And the approach of intent-based configuration is increasingly familiar, with the growth of Kubernetes in the platform engineering world. Otterize’s product disrupts an environment in which engineers have had no good choices: they either can’t connect securely, have to teach everyone to connect securely to every new technology, or they must tackle every new need manually within the small platform engineering team. These approaches inevitably generate friction. Otterize alleviates such issues, adding visibility and insights from the free Otterize Cloud service to the Otterize OSS project for Kubernetes. Otterize Cloud lets users explore the “access graph” of their Kubernetes cluster visually, to gradually and safely roll out IBAC.

“The motivation for starting Otterize wasn’t to provide yet another policy engine, an easier configuration UI, or another dashboard. It was to completely rethink how service-to-service access can be made both effortless and secure, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than on configuring server permissions. And if possible, do it without introducing any new authorization components,” said Tomer Greenwald, Otterize CEO. “I’m excited to see that vision now becomes a reality, with a new approach – intent-based access control (IBAC) – and a product you can deploy in minutes.”

As for Snyk, the company has now fired 326 people including 198 let go last December. It was also in December that Snyk raised $196.5 million in a Series G investment led by QIA (Qatar Investment Authority), which at the time gave the company a $7.4 billion valuation. However, that was down from a previous $8 billion plus valuation.

Founded in 2015 by Israelis Assaf Hefetz, Danny Grander, and Guy Podjarny, Snyk provides cloud native application security (CNAS) solutions which enable modern applications to be built securely, empowering developers to own and build security for the whole application, from code and open source to containers and cloud infrastructure.

Snyk says that its SaaS platform can help developers find their vulnerabilities and license violations in their open source codebases, containers, and Kubernetes applications. By connecting their code repository, Snyk customers gain access to a giant vulnerability database, which enables Snyk to serve a description of the problem, point to where the flaw in the code lies, and even suggests a fix.

In a letter explaining the layoffs, Snyk CEO Peter McKay said the company needs to adapt to future “market challenges” telling employees, “As we’ve discussed over the past several quarters, we anticipated a tough start to 2023, but we were prepared to accelerate growth in the back half of the year. We now know that the challenging market conditions are likely to persist into early 2024, so we must once again adapt.”