Cybersecurity provider Akto on Thursday said it has raised $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Accel India.
Angel investors including Akshay Kothari, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Notion, Renaud Deraison, co-founder of Tenable and Milin Desai, chief executive of Sentry also participated in the round.
Founded in January 2022 by Ankita Gupta and Ankush Jain, Akto provides a plug and play API (Application Programming Interface) security platform, which helps security teams and developers secure their APIs in the development pipeline. APIs are software intermediaries that allow two applications to talk to each other.
The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. In India, the company has an office in Bengaluru, where it has eight employees.
“We learned that the biggest challenge facing teams seeking API security solutions is that it takes months to try them. We have set out to create a solution that is not only fast to act but super easy to deploy. The plug and play element mean that our customers can get an instant inventory of APIs within 2 minutes,” said Gupta.
The company claims its plug-and-play platform can be deployed in less than a minute. The company helps in securing the APIs, which carry sensitive data, during the development cycle. It is currently securing thousands of APIs of some of the largest fintech and SaaS companies across the globe, the company said.
“Today APIs are pervasive - they are the glue that enables any software to provide rich functionality. However, till recently not much thought was given to securing APIs. Securing APIs requires identifying complex patterns of API misuse,” said Prayank Swaroop, Partner, Accel India.
“In the current market, all the solutions overwhelm security teams by throwing a lot of false positives. Akto’s approach and tech addresses all of these problems and provides a reliable, scalable, easy to install & accurate API security solution. We are very excited to be a part of their journey,” he added.