ShiftLeft promises to protect your code even when you ignore security threats

Every day companies are uploading fresh code to the cloud. The pace is startling and that tends to lead to errors. We have seen security software in the past that will check that code for problems and security holes and recommend fixes before launching, but what happens when your programming team doesn’t have time or money to make those fixes (or simply ignores them)?

ShiftLeft, a startup that emerged from stealth today says it’s going to protect you anyway.

That’s right, you can ignore their security recommendations and they will know it and build in protection at launch, says CEO and founder Manish Gupta. He says they are able to do that because they conduct a study of the code and all its dependencies before run time, then create an agent that travels with the software that protects it against any vulnerabilities it found.

This works regardless of whether the application runs in a traditional virtual machine or in containers as a set of microservices, making it a good solution for a modern DevOps environment.

Gupta acknowledges that coders are paid to crank out code, not to make sure it’s secure. He wants ShiftLeft to help in this go-go world to protect the code regardless. “Once we analyze the source code, we will tell you we see this issue, and you should fix it. If you don’t fix it, we know this is an issue, so our runtime is protecting you from that vulnerability,” Gupta said.

The company also announced a healthy $9.3 million Series A investment led by Bain Capital Ventures and Mayfield along with individual investors including Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware; Tobias Knaup, CTO of Mesosphere; and Prabhu Goel, founder of Verilog. In addition, ShiftLeft announced that Enrique Salem from Bain Capital Ventures and Ursheet Parikh from Mayfield have joined the company’s Board of Directors.

Bain Capital Venture’s Salem says that his firm liked ShiftLeft’s approach to work within rapid modern coding methodologies. “Lack of security expertise, coupled with alert fatigue caused by traditional security solutions, is fundamentally at odds with today’s rapid pace of software development. Recognizing the need for a more accurate and an equally agile security methodology, ShiftLeft has built a solution purpose-built to operationalize security for the new, highly agile cloud applications,” Salem said in a statement.

The company, which is based in Santa Clara, currently has 24 employees and half a dozen early customers as it emerges from stealth.