PALO ALTO – Salt Security, an API security company, has raised $140 million in Series D funding, led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, with participation from all existing investors. The latest investment brings the valuation of Salt Security to $1.4 billion.
Salt Security plans to use the additional capital to expand R&D investment, fuel sales and marketing, and more rapidly grow its international operations to address the growing number of cyber threats targeting APIs.
The investment by CapitalG, less than eight months after Salt Security raised its $70 million Series C round, comes as demand for API security surges, with businesses needing to protect the APIs driving their digital transformation, application mobilization, and other IT modernization initiatives. This round brings the company’s total funding to $271 million, with $210 million raised in the last 12 months.
“Our investment in Salt Security comes at a time of critical importance for the wider business community. APIs are essential to enabling business innovation, but security risks are multiplying at an unprecedented scope and scale. Salt took an innovative, best-in-class approach to building its API security platform leveraging cloud-scale big data, allowing it to effectively detect and stop attacks in the wild while not compromising on strong shift left capabilities,” said James Luo, Partner at CapitalG and Salt Security board member. “Salt Security has a proven record of success as the leading solution in the market, and our conversations with customers made it clear that Salt is providing them with market-leading protection and the fastest time to value. We look forward to partnering with the team at Salt Security to help it catapult into the next tier of market penetration and success.”
All the investors who have backed Salt Security in previous rounds also participated in this raise, including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, Tenaya Capital, S Capital VC, Advent International, Alkeon Capital, and DFJ Growth.
“YC Continuity invests only in the very best, category-defining YC companies. Salt Security is one of those companies,” said Ali Rowghani, managing director, YC Continuity. “Like fellow YCC companies Stripe in payments and DoorDash in food delivery, Salt will become an iconic security company. Five years ago, the Salt founders had the vision to create this critical category, and they have led it ever since by creating the most secure and robust solution in the industry. The company’s innovation and dominance led us to double down on our investment.”
In the past year, Salt says it has added a number of leading financial services, insurance, pharmaceutical, eCommerce/retail, and digital services companies to its customer ranks. Recent new customers include Takeda Pharmaceuticals, bp Launchpad (the digital innovation and scale up unit of bp), Markel, Icatu Seguros, Apiture, and Berkshire Bank. In the same period, Salt Security said it drove:
- 500% growth in revenue
- 300% growth in its customer base
- 250% growth in its employee count
- 900% growth in signed customers among Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies
