Startups

Zenity raises $5M to help secure low-code/no-code applications

Comment

Image Credits: Zenity

As more companies adopt low-code/no-code tools to build their line-of-business applications, it’s maybe no surprise that we are now seeing a new crop of services in this ecosystem that focus on keeping these tools secure. These include Tel Aviv-based Zenity, which is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $5 million seed funding round. The round was led by Vertex Ventures and UpWest. A number of angel investors, including the former CISO of Google, Gerhard Eschelbeck, and the former CIO of SuccessFactors, Tom Fisher, also participated in this round.

Zenity argues that as employees start building their own applications and adopt tools like robotic process automation (RPA), this new class of applications also opens up new avenues for potential breaches and ransomware attacks.

“Companies are heavily adopting low-code/no-code, without realizing the risks it employs nor their part in the shared responsibility model,” said Zenity co-founder and CEO Ben Kliger. “We empower CIOs and CISOs to seamlessly govern their low-code/no-code applications and prevent unintentional data leaks, disturbance to business continuity, compliance risks or malicious breaches.”

The Zenity platform helps businesses build a catalog of low-code/no-code apps in their organization, mitigate potential issues and set up a governance policy for their organization that can then be automatically enforced. The company argues that the methods of traditional security services don’t transfer to low-code/no-code applications, yet the need for a tool like this is only growing, especially given that most of the developers that use it don’t have a security background (or maybe any software development background at all).

Image Credits: Zenity

The company was founded by CEO Kliger and CTO Michael Bargury, who both previously worked on the Azure and cloud security teams at Microsoft.

“The challenge is mitigating the risks and security threats associated with low-code/no-code solutions without disturbing the business,” said Tom Fisher, Zenity advisor and former CIO of Oracle and Qualcomm, and CTO of eBay. “Zenity provides the perfect combination of governance and security tools with a pro-business approach that helps business developers build with confidence.”

More TechCrunch

For over six decades, the nonprofit has been active in the financial services sector.

Accion’s new $152.5M fund will back financial institutions serving small businesses globally

Meta’s newest social network, Threads is starting its own fact-checking program after piggybacking on Instagram and Facebook’s network for a few months. Instagram head Adam Mosseri noted that the company…

Threads finally starts its own fact-checking program

Looking Glass makes trippy-looking mixed-reality screens that make things look 3D without the need of special glasses. Today, it launches a pair of new displays, including a 16-inch mode that…

Looking Glass launches new 3D displays

Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs

Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.

Intuitive Machines wants to help NASA return samples from Mars

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the…

Google adds ‘Web’ search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday.  The NS-25…

Blue Origin to resume crewed New Shepard launches on May 19

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results