Investing in Endor Labs

Venture investing is sometimes characterized as looking for out of the box thinking on the next, next horizon technologies. But it’s often the founders who have a smart sense of pattern recognition and a drive to solve today’s material challenges who prove to be the most successful.

Today we have the privilege of sharing our investment in Varun Badhwar, Dimitri Stiliadis, and the team at Endor Labs. The company is focused on securing the software supply chain by addressing the ungoverned sprawl of open source software in the enterprise. This is no small challenge.

According to firms that track these things, OSS now makes up on average 75% to 80% of an organizations’ codebase. The rise of platforms like GitHub and GitLab and CI/CD practices have meant that at this point, you cannot develop state-of-the-art software without open source and other 3^rd party software components. Accordingly, the way we track and secure our code base needs to change.

Varun Badhwar has seen this pattern before and he has a playbook for it: Identify what security solutions the F500 enterprise market needs because of massive IT trends and solve those needs in the least disruptive and most developer-friendly manner possible.  In 2010, he co-founded CipherCloud, to identify shadow IT challenges caused by the massive adoption of SaaS applications and to secure the data stored in those applications.

And as the F500 enterprises were starting to embrace IaaS clouds such as AWS and GCP, Varun co-founded RedLock, to help those enterprise identify and remediate new security issues in IaaS clouds.

Redlock was acquired by Palo Alto Networks (PANW) in 2018, where Varun ended up leading Prisma Cloud, arguably the cyber industry’s most successful (IaaS) public cloud security platform. There he met Dimitri, the founder of Aporeto (also acquired by PANW). In founding Endor Labs together, we believe they are well positioned to recreate that same magic of their previous companies, this time focused on securing the software supply chain.

We are bullish on this team not just because of the track record of exits but because they know how to attract the best engineers and top GTM talent, and because they’ve spent the decade earning the respect and trust of a who’s who list of enterprise customers.

We’re grateful to be along for another company-building journey with Varun, Dimitri and the entire Endor Labs team.

Deepak Jeevankumar & the DTC team