Application programming interface security startup Traceable Inc. today announced a strategic partnership with Silicon Valley CISO Investments, an angel syndicate of 55 practicing chief information security officers.

The amount of the funding, about $250,000 is less important than what the company calls “social equity” from the involvement of the CISOs providing not only capital but also advice and expertise.

Founded in 2018 and launched out of stealth in July, Traceable offers a security platform that tracks end-to-end application activity from the user and session all the way down to the code. The company’s platform combines end-to-end distributed tracing, cloud-native integrations and enhance behavioral analytics to provide modern application and API security.

Designed to support Kubernetes, Envoy service mesh, serverless and other cloud-native environments, the platform, using machine learning learns normal application behavior and detects activities that deviate from the norm, allowing users to analyze attack attempts and perform root cause analysis to conduct security operations. The company claims a false positive rate of less than 1%.

“The primary thing we bring to the party is solve problems with API security,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Jyoti Bansal, who founded AppDynamics Inc., which was acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. in 2017. “Those APIs are everywhere now and they’re becoming a key attack vector. We saw the biggest concern developers and DevOps staff had was APIs.”

As for Silicon Valley CISO Investments, Bansal told SiliconANGLE, 30 of the 55 practicing CISOs in the group, including those at Box Inc., Atlassian Corp. plc and Databricks Inc., invested in Traceable. “The value for us isn’t just the capital but the insights of these people,” he said, such as on product and technology directions, sales strategies and networking. “It definitely helps from a validation standpoint.”

Total funding raised to date is unknown for Traceable, but the company had previously raised $20 million from investors that included Unusual Ventures and BIG Labs.

Bansal is a busy man. Not only does he run Traceable and another company he started — the continuous software delivery platform Harness Inc. — he also runs Unusual Ventures and BIG Labs.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Traceable