Software-as-a-service security Atmosec Ltd. is launching out of stealth mode today armed with $6 million in seed funding.

The round was led by Glilot Capital Partners and Battery Ventures. Additional funds also came from a number of cybersecurity industry veterans, including Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, co-founders of device security platform Armis Security Inc., Assaf Rappaport, the co-founder and chief executive of cloud-native security startup Wiz Inc., and Ofer Ben-Noon, co-founder and CEO of Talon Cyber Security Ltd.

Aided by its knowledgeable backers, Atmosec is looking to take on the challenge of securely connecting third-party SaaS applications such as Slack, Dropbox, Google Workplace, ServiceNow and others. As the company explains, adoption of those tools has accelerated as they become necessary to ensure continuation of business in a world of remote work. So enterprises are increasingly connecting various SaaS apps, without any real idea of the risk it creates.

Atmosec argues the chaotic and expanding SaaS ecosystem is a primary target for cyber attackers looking to exploit those connections, which are monitored by very few companies. Co-founder and CEO Aner Gelman said cloud-native enterprises and those transitioning to the cloud are forced to take control of their growing SaaS ecosystems, and that Atmosec has the unique ability to help them do this by understanding how SaaS platforms actually behave.

“Understanding behavior, and more importantly, irregular behavior, is fairly complex in security,” Gelman told SiliconANGLE. “Current SaaS security solutions mostly consider static parameters, such as configurations or permissions, and fail to take actual behavior into account. But it takes a deeper understanding of the services or applications being used and how they integrate with one another to understand problems in behavior and how to solve them.”

Battery Ventures partner Adi Dangot Zukovsky said it’s surprising how so many enterprises use inadequate systems to manage third-party risk.

“Atmosec is addressing this critical problem with new technology that provides cloud-native enterprises with greater visibility into their existing systems,” he said. “It helps them lower the risk of outsiders exploiting their third-party business applications and app-to-app connectivity paths.”

The startup’s SaaS security platform works by trying to understand the correct behavior of each app. Then, it applies contextual analysis to monitor them in real time. That allows Atmosec to know what is really occurring between numerous connected SaaS apps – and if something anomalous occurs, it can immediately detect it.

Image: Atmosec