Endor Labs secures strategic investment from Citi Ventures

Endor Labs has announced a strategic investment from Citi Ventures, marking a further validation of its approach to securing the software supply chain.

This new investment follows the company's receipt of USD $70 million in Series A financing from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, Dell Technologies Capital and Section 32, as well as several notable CEOs, CISOs and CTOs.

Founded in 2022 by Varun Badhwar and Dimitri Stiliadis, Endor Labs aims to address significant gaps in application security, focusing on dependencies such as Open Source Software (OSS), containers, and various tools used in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. These dependencies can introduce risks that are often invisible to development and security teams.

Varun Badhwar, CEO and co-founder of Endor Labs, discussed the growing importance of software supply chain security for financial institutions. "Financial institutions employ tens of thousands of developers, and often outpace technology companies with innovation and shipping new applications," Badhwar stated. "Software supply chain security is now a board-level concern for these organizations. Ignoring it or getting it wrong not only exposes the organization to significant risk but also costs hundreds of millions in lost developer productivity. Endor Labs already serves some of the largest financial institutions in the US, and our work with Citi gives us even better insights into how to solve problems at this scale."

Citi Ventures, known for investing in startups revolutionising financial services, sees significant potential in Endor Labs’ solutions. Clark Smith, Head of Engineering and Architecture for CISO & Managing Director at Citi, highlighted the practical advantages of the partnership. "Citi runs one of the largest software development organisations in the world. At this scale, lost productivity due to false positive alerts is a compounding issue. Endor Labs integrates seamlessly into the developer workflow and helps pinpoint supply chain risks that may affect our business," he explained.

Matt Carbonara, Head of Enterprise Tech Investing at Citi Ventures, echoed this sentiment by emphasising the innovation brought by Endor Labs. "Their platform represents a technological step change in how vulnerabilities are analysed. For a long time now, developers have had to manually analyse vulnerabilities to assess if they are exercised in production. We believe that the reachability analysis provided by Endor Labs will be a must-have technology for enterprises, focusing developers' efforts on only the most critical and reachable vulnerabilities and saving them countless hours. We’re extremely excited to become investors and partner with Varun and team," Carbonara added.

Endor Labs has made significant strides since its inception, gaining traction with Fortune 500 enterprises and emerging cloud-native companies alike. The company’s capabilities include surfacing meaningful risks across dependencies in the software development lifecycle, enabling application security teams to prioritise their efforts more effectively. This streamlined approach aims to reduce the burden of uncontextualised security alerts on developers, allowing them to concentrate on rectifying the most pressing issues.

The strategic investment from Citi Ventures is expected to enhance Endor Labs' ability to cater to large-scale financial institutions and improve their security frameworks. Endor Labs continues to be recognised within the industry, having been named a finalist at both the 2023 RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox and the 2023 Black Hat Startup Spotlight, as well as winning the SINET16 Innovator Award.