Salt Security Joins Growing Herd Of Cyber-Corns

Cybersecurity received an unprecedented level of funding last year, and it seems like this year will continue at that pace.

API security company Salt Security on Thursday announced a $140 million Series D round led by Alphabet’s CapitalG, earning the company a $1.4 billion valuation and minting it as cybersecurity’s latest unicorn.

Salt becomes the fourth cyber unicorn of the calendar year, according to Crunchbase data, joining Veriff, Aleo and SparkCognition.

The new round brings the Palo Alto, California-based company’s total funding to $271 million, with $210 million raised in the past 12 months.

Salt plays in what emerged last year as one of the hotter spaces of cyber: API security. In simple terms, an API is what enables two applications to communicate with each other. When someone uses social media or buys groceries, the app they are using needs to connect through an API to another application for that transaction to go through.

APIs are also vital in software development, especially with the advent of “microservices,” which allow developers to add prebuilt functions to an app, like communication and location services.

Without secure APIs to protect the data that flows between applications, attacks can occur.

Last year, several companies including London-based 42Crunch, Colorado-based ThreatX, Sunnyvale, California-based Cequence Security and others all received funding for their API security platforms.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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