Backline automatically remediates security vulnerabilities

Backline, a new security startup that uses AI agents to automatically remediate security vulnerabilities, is coming out of stealth with a $9 million seed round led by StageOne Ventures.

This is the third startup by Maor Goldberg, the company’s co-founder and CEO. He previously co-founded Whitebox Security, which he sold to SailPoint in 2015, as well as container security startup Apolicy, which was acquired by Sysdig in 2021. In 2024, he left Sysdig to start Backline together with Eran Leib (chief customer officer), and Aviad Chen (VP R&D).

The idea behind Backline is that developers and security teams are drowning in security alerts.

“The one thing we’ve seen constantly, almost day-in, day-out, is that we as an industry drown large organizations with problems,” Goldberg said. “They buy Sysdig, they buy Wizz, they buy Snyk — all of these great companies and great names. Their job is to go to customers and tell them where they have problems. The reality is that these security teams are buying these tools, but they can’t fix most of these problems.”

The security teams, after all, rely on engineers to fix vulnerabilities, for example, or on platform engineering teams to fix misconfigurations.

“There’s always a need for security teams to go and chase someone else in the organization. And all of these teams, without exception, just don’t have the time,” he said.

Backline can essentially take notifications from all of these security tools and start remediating many of the issues. The service’s AI agents look at the vulnerability, create a proposal for how to fix it, implement the necessary changes, and then test them.

This testing step is crucial, Backline says, and was inspired by the way hardware teams use formal methods to test their products. This, Goldberg said, is the only way to generate trust with potential users.

To do this, the company uses off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs). “All of our intellectual property is built around picking up where [the security scanning tools] left off. There is a high priority problem that needs to be addressed. A lot of [this is about] thinking about agents, how you collaborate together and how you bring the right people into the process,” Goldberg explained.

Backline’s ambitions go beyond its current remediation of software vulnerabilities. Looking ahead, the company wants to tackle software supply chain issues like finding exposed secrets, fixing identity and access issues, and static application security testing.

“Security backlogs are now the number one thing keeping CISOs up at night,” said Tal Slobodkin, managing partner at StageOne Ventures, and a backer of the founding team’s previous startup. “Backline’s deep cybersecurity expertise combined with their vision for autonomous remediation present a way out of the prioritization paradigm through multiple orders of magnitude improvement in remediation velocity. We haven’t talked to a single organization that claims to have their security backlog fully under control, which signals just how significant this opportunity is.”

Evolution Equity Partners and Gradient also invested in the seed round.