Spin Technology zeros-in on SaaS app security, raises $16M  

If there’s one tool most enterprises today can’t live without, it’s SaaS apps. Yet while these services are convenient for users and offer access to valuable cloud services, they’re also difficult to secure. 

In hybrid working environments, many organizations are reliant on cloud technology and apps that they have limited visibility or control over. 

For Spin Technology Inc., which today announced it has raised $16 million as part of a Series A funding round, a detection and response strategy for SaaS apps is becoming a critical capability for enterprises. 

Spin Technology’s automatically assesses apps and browser extensions that could be vulnerable to data leaks and zero-day attacks, alongside ransomware monitoring, incident response, and backup and recovery capabilities. 

Securing the SaaS app stack

The announcement comes as ransomware has remained a constant threat to enterprises, with SonicWall’s 2022 Cyber Threat Report finding that ransomware attacks increased by 1,885% in 2021. 

At the same time, research shows that the average cost of a ransomware breach is $4.62 million, highlighting that organizations aren’t able to contain these incidents effectively. 

While there are many reasons as to why this is, part of the challenge is that there is a vast attack surface of third party apps and services that security teams need to secure. One instance of overlooking the vulnerability of a SaaS app, or ignoring the presence of a consumer-focused app on a work device, could lead to a devastating data breach. 

SpinOne’s aims to address these challenges by providing a solution to manage the security of SaaS apps. 

“SpinOne remedies the problem of security teams needing to cobble together disparate SaaS security applications,” and “protects against threats and data loss for all mission-critical SaaS work environments including Google Workspace, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce,” said CEO of Spin Technology, Dmitry Dontov. 

Dontov says that SpinOne can help identify how employees share, download or transfer data inside or outside of the organization while providing incident response support to reduce the downtime of a cloud ransomware attack to 2 hours. 

The application security market 

SpinOne sits loosely within the application security market, which researchers valued at $6.2 billion in 2020, and anticipate will reach $13.2 billion by 2025 as more organizations look to mitigate application-level threats. 

The organization is competing against a range of providers including Adaptive Shield, a SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) provider which last year announced it had raised $30 million as part of a Series A funding round. 

Adaptive Shield’s platform can continuously identify misconfigurations within an enterprise’s SaaS stack, providing a security posture score per app. 

Another application security provider competing with SpinOne is Obsidian Security, which raised $90 million as part of a Series C funding round earlier this year, bringing its total funding to $119.5 million. 

Obsidian Security offers an agentless solution with cloud detection and response capabilities to enable enterprises to protect users against account takeover attempts and insider threats, detecting malicious activity and misconfigurations. 

However, the main differentiator between Spin Technology and these competitors is that it combines ransomware monitoring and incident response, SaaS app risk assessment, with data loss prevention and backup and recovery capabilities into a single solution.