Valence Security

Every enterprise app that gets connected - a marketing tool, a code repository, an AI assistant - is another door into the business. The average organization has thousands of these doors, most opened without security ever signing off. Valence Security exists to count those doors, judge which ones are unlocked, and help shut the dangerous ones.

The company describes its purpose plainly: protect organizations from the threats created by SaaS and AI sprawl. Rather than sell one narrow tool, Valence unifies four capabilities that have historically lived in separate products - SaaS discovery, SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM), AI Security Posture Management (AI-SPM), and Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) - into a single platform. It discovers shadow apps and AI agents, flags misconfigurations before they become incidents, watches human and non-human identities for suspicious behavior, and then does the part most tools skip: it helps teams fix what it finds.

SaaS adoption outran the ability to govern it. Business teams buy and connect apps directly, granting OAuth permissions and wiring integrations without a security review. The result is a sprawling, interconnected estate where a single over-permissioned token or forgotten third-party grant can expose sensitive data. Traditional network and endpoint tools were never built to see inside Microsoft 365, Salesforce, GitHub, or Slack - let alone the connections between them.

Two newer complications sharpen the problem. First, non-human identities - service accounts, API keys, automation bots - now outnumber human users in many organizations, and each is a credential an attacker can abuse. Second, AI has arrived inside SaaS: embedded copilots, third-party AI integrations, and autonomous agents that request broad permissions humans would rarely be granted. Valence frames this as the shift from shadow IT to shadow AI, and it built its discovery and posture tools to surface both.

Plenty of vendors can produce a dashboard of SaaS risks. Valence's argument is that dashboards are not the bottleneck - remediation is. Its platform leans on one-click fixes, automated workflows, and a distinctive collaborative model: when a risky configuration traces back to a specific business user, Valence loops that person into the fix rather than routing everything through an overloaded security queue. The often-cited fact is that the risky setting was usually made by a marketer or an engineer, not an attacker, so the fastest path to closing it runs through them.

The second differentiator is scope. By combining discovery, SSPM, AI-SPM, and ITDR in one platform, Valence positions integration itself as the moat - avoiding the seams that appear when teams stitch together five point tools. Its neutrality across vendors is part of the pitch too: the company that helps secure Microsoft 365 also secures Google Workspace, Salesforce, GitHub, Okta, and more than 170 other applications.

Valence launched from stealth in 2021 with a $7M seed led by YL Ventures. In October 2022 it announced a $25M Series A led by M12, Microsoft's corporate venture arm - a notable vote of confidence given how much of Valence's work involves securing Microsoft's own SaaS products. Participants included YL Ventures, Porsche Ventures, Akamai Technologies, Alumni Ventures, and former Symantec CEO Michael Fey.

Valence sits in the fast-consolidating SaaS security posture management (SSPM) category, competing with vendors such as AppOmni, Obsidian Security, DoControl, Grip Security, and Wing Security. Adaptive Shield, once a peer, was acquired by CrowdStrike - a sign that the larger platform players see SaaS security as strategic. Valence's differentiation in that field is its emphasis on remediation and its early expansion into AI security posture management, staking out ground for what it calls the agentic era, when AI agents rather than people request access to sensitive systems.