Today, Unusual Ventures is thrilled to announce that we have partnered with Traceable to execute on its mission to protect cloud-native applications and APIs from modern and evolving cybersecurity threats. We are pleased to lead their $20M Series A round.

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Traceable, the only application security platform built on distributed tracing and machine learning, delivers end-to-end protection—from user to API to code—for cloud-native applications. “We felt the market desperately needed a modern approach to application security, due to the massive transformation application architectures, development methodologies, and operational processes have undergone over the last decade, and if there was one team to bet on to build a world class solution, this was it,” said John Vrionis, co-founder at Unusual Ventures.  

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Application security teams have been stuck protecting modern applications with solutions that were built for a previous era. Traceable brings development and security teams together to protect and monitor production cloud-native applications and investigate threats and vulnerabilities with drill-down, code-level analytics, and forensics. Driving these capabilities is TraceAI, Traceable’s machine learning technology, which is fed by distributed tracing data collected in real time directly from the application. This rich trace data enables TraceAI to continuously learn normal application behavior (even as code and APIs change) and immediately detect malicious activity when user and/or application behaviors deviate from this norm. The Traceable team is proud to announce that they have made their distributed tracing platform available as Hypertrace, an open source project freely available to the DevOps community.

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Traceable is founded by Sanjay Nagaraj (former VP engineering of AppDynamics) and Jyoti Bansal (yes, that Jyoti—the founder and former CEO of AppDynamics, co-founder and CEO of Harness.io, and co-founder of Unusual Ventures). Together they have assembled an incredible technical team and worked tirelessly over the past several months hand in hand with Unusual’s Get Ahead Platform (GAP), to prepare the company for exiting stealth mode. Bill Hodak, marketing partner at Unusual Ventures, said, “Together, we have developed the company’s messaging, created a phenomenal website, iterated to define the initial ideal customer profile, and put in place all of the demand generation operational infrastructure.” 

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Liam Mulcahy, director of sales GTM at Unusual Ventures, added, “In working with the Traceable team as their first head of sales via our GAP engagement, we were able to craft and execute their go-to-market strategy encompassing everything from setting up sales-tool infrastructure, outlining discovery questions, creating a sales deck, and establishing qualification stages, etc. Working with such a strong team allowed us to iterate quickly to find product-market-sales fit, leading to closing our first paying customers and working with companies ranging from the Fortune 500, Cloud 100, FinTech 100, and 2020 Unicorn Class." 

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This type of collaboration between Unusual and our portfolio companies was exactly what John and Jyoti envisioned when they founded Unusual and brought GAP to life. At Unusual we aspire to reinvent the early stage venture business by partnering with product visionaries, providing unprecedented levels of operational support, and concrete deliverables to advance the company through product-market fit. We’ve successfully done this with a world class team at Traceable and couldn’t be more excited for the impact this group will have on the ecosystem. Congrats team Traceable!

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Read more about Traceable coming out of stealth from its co-founders

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TechCrunch with more on Traceable's vision and opportunity

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