Leen announces pre-seed funding for its unified data API for security

‍Leen, a unified data API for cybersecurity, has successfully raised it pre-seed funding round, accelerating its mission to help security engineers build and maintain integrations at scale via a unified data API. The company is co-founded by Kabir Mathur (CEO), Akash Bhat (COO) and Neel Arora (CTO).

The round was led by 11.2 Capital with participation from security and dev-tools-focused funds including InnerLoop Capital & Preface Ventures.

Regarding their investment in Leen, Pramod Gosavi of 11.2 Capital expressed the following thoughts:

"CISOs utilize over 10,000 security tools from more than 4,000 vendors and also hire security engineers for use cases not addressed by these vendors. Both cybersecurity vendors and security engineers require security data to build these use cases effectively. Leen.dev is developing a unified platform akin to “Plaid for security data”, which acts as a centralized hub for aggregating, de-duplicating, and standardizing data from security tools. This enables security vendors and security engineers to focus on building use cases and not integrations."

The round also included participation from several prominent security-focused operators and angel investors, such as Varun Badhwar (CEO, Endor Labs), Travis McPeak (CEO, Resourcely), Jeff Trudeau (CISO, Chime), Adrian Ludwig (Ex-CISO, Atlassian & SVCI) Kumar Saurabh (Co-founder, SumoLogic), Jason Chan (Ex-VP of Information Security, Netflix), Anna Westelius (Director of Security Engineering, Netflix), Julie Tsai (LP, Rain Capital & Ex-Security Leader at Box, Walmart & Roblox), Adam Fletcher (CEO, Bit.io - acq. by Databricks), Feross Aboukhadijeh (CEO, Socket), William Bengtson (Senior Director of Security Engineering, HashiCorp), Todd Dekinga (CISO, Zluri), Emilio Escobar (CISO, Datadog) and Srinivas Mukkamala (CPO, Ivanti).

“As someone deeply immersed in the cybersecurity field for over 15 years, I'm genuinely excited about the strides Leen is making with their unified data API. In my experience, the complexity of integrating with various security vendors is a significant hurdle, and Leen is directly addressing this issue. They're not just creating another tool; they're simplifying the entire ecosystem, making it easier and more efficient for other products in the space to manage and utilize security data. I'm proud to support such a forward-thinking initiative and am eager to see how Leen will continue to innovate and shape the future of cybersecurity” –– Varun Badhwar (CEO, Endor Labs & Angel Investor)

Leen and its Unified API

Unified APIs and common data models play crucial roles in enhancing security operations by facilitating interoperability, consistency, and efficiency across various security tools and systems.

Leen’s unified approach saves developers time and effort by offering a single integration point, thus reducing the complexity of managing multiple APIs and integrations

Additionally, Leen’s common data model tailors to specific sub-categories within the security landscape (think VMS, IAM, Endpoint, MDM, etc), incorporating data from a range of security products including the likes of Qualys, Tenable, Snyk, Crowdstrike, SentinelOne, MS Defender, and many more, enhancing the organization and comprehensiveness of the data significantly.

Thoropass, a company specializing in automated compliance and audits, shared their experiences with Leen, emphasizing its significant impact on their audit processes:

"Thoropass strives to make information security compliance easy for its customers with new integrations that automate compliance tasks and streamline the audit process. Leen's unified API streamlines security data management in the Thoropass platform to support an organization's increasingly diverse tech stack. The result is a highly scalable compliance ecosystem that benefits both Thoropass customers and auditors, delivering efficient and effective compliance automation." –– Annie Gregory (Sr. Product Manager, Thoropass)

A Big Problem in a Growing Market

According to Gartner, global cybersecurity spending is projected to reach $215 billion in 2024, marking a 14.3% increase from the estimated $188.1 billion in 2023. Additionally, companies within this sector currently allocate $18.8 billion towards integration services, making it the primary market segment for Leen to target initially.

Speaking about the funding, Co-founder & CEO, Kabir Mathur had this to say:

"This round of funding serves as initial validation for our hypothesis that interfacing with hundreds of security APIs is a hard problem faced by security vendors and teams alike. There are already thousands of security tools on the market and the rapid growth of the security industry only compounds the challenge. Leen’s goal is to be the common data layer that connects tools from across the security stack- enabling vendors and security teams to focus on building their platforms, apps and internal security programs."

Proven Track Record

Leen’s team has solved this problem before. Neel Arora, Co-founder and CTO, has previously built and stood up the data normalization and orchestration platform at BlueVoyant, an MDR & Threat Intelligence services company. He had this to say about his experience at BlueVoyant:

"Data normalization is a persistent challenge in cybersecurity, demanding careful planning, thorough testing, and regular updates for effective implementation. We saw teams build out the same normalization layer over and over again; something I too experienced and implemented at BlueVoyant. At Leen, our aim is to streamline this essential yet laborious normalization process through our dev and data tools, enabling teams to effortlessly utilize security data in addressing their specific challenges."

About Leen

Leen is a Unified data API for cybersecurity. Product and engineering teams integrate with Leen’s data models once and get access to data from hundreds of security tools including SentinelOne, Crowdstrike, Palo Alto Firewall, Tenable, Qualys, Snyk, Wiz and many more. Leen helps teams easily scale integrations by offering a flexible platform all powered by its SDK & API, that can be used to leverage end customer data directly within applications and services without the hassle of maintaining integrations and data pipelines.