Leen - Plaid for Data Security

Company & Team Introduction

Leen is the leading unified API for cybersecurity data, empowering teams to launch integrations in hours, not weeks, with their pre-built connectors and unified data models. This allows companies to easily integrate security products with 100s of other tools so they can get back to focusing on the core product. The company was founded by the trio of Kabir Mathur, Akash Bhat, and Neel Arora in late 2023. Kabir, the company's CEO, previously held roles at various startups such as Typeform and Kiip and attended the Georgia Institute of Technology before starting Leen. Akash, the company’s COO, received a master's degree from Columbia before breaking into VC, working for Scrum Ventures, and mentoring for Berkeley Venture Capital. CTO Neel Arora is well versed in cybersecurity after a nearly 5-year stint in various high-ranking roles at cybersecurity startup BlueVoyant, where he watched company after company build the same data normalization layer. He and his co-founders knew there had to be a solution to such a widespread pain point in the security industry. Leen is headquartered in San Francisco, California and has grown their team size to ~6 employees.

Product Overview

Leen offers a security-focused API that allows teams to launch hassle-free integrations lightning-fast. The company’s APIs provide various benefits to customers, including data normalization and unified data models for different categories of security tools, saving developers massive amounts of time so they can focus on their actual product. Leen’s API is built with bi-directional integrations, allowing teams to read data from various security products and then write back to them or complete actions like updating configurations and creating IT tickets. Thanks to its unified data model, Leen empowers customers to merge disparate data sets across tools to find unique insights. The API also allows companies to create powerful automations, whether it be prioritizing vulnerabilities, driving compliance workflows, testing asset coverage, and much more.

Total Addressable Market

Leen is well-positioned to capitalize on a massive greenfield opportunity with their n-of-1 product. Gartner research estimates the total addressable market for cybersecurity is projected to reach $215B in 2024, up an impressive 14.3% YoY growth from $188B in 2023. Of that 215B in total security spending, $18.8B is allocated toward integration services, giving Leen a massive initial market to sell to. Furthermore, projections from Grand View Research show the market will sustain strong growth through 2030, with ~12% growth in new vendors entering the market each year, expanding the total addressable market for cybersecurity to an incredible ~$425B by 2030.

Business Model & The Numbers

Leen uses a flexible custom pricing model calculated based on the number of active connections being used in your environment.

Traction

Leen has already attracted a small yet impressive list of early customers, such as enterprise risk management company Pellonium and venture-backed compliance startups like Scytale and Thoropass as customers. Thoropass Senior Product Manager Annie Gregory said this about their company’s experience with Leen: “Leen's unified API streamlines security data management in the Thoropass platform to support an organization's increasingly diverse tech stack. The result is a highly scalable compliance ecosystem that benefits both Thoropass customers and auditors, delivering efficient and effective compliance automation."

Competitors

Leen is truly a unique product in the market, as they’re the only unified API focused on cybersecurity integrations at the moment. However, with the massive pain points Leen solves for security-focused companies, expect competition to arrive soon. Before Leen, companies could build their integrations in-house from scratch or outsource, but both solutions were time-consuming, complex and expensive. It is important to note there are unified API solutions for different verticals like merge.dev and the open source nango.dev, which focus more on the HR/payroll/ticketing/accounting/CRM markets but may eventually look to expand into new verticals such as cybersecurity as growth in their initial verticals slow, but the cybersecurity vertical is quite unique due to its breadth and fragmentation. With over 10,000+ security tools from thousands of different vendors coupled with the never-ending influx of new security companies, it will be tough to compete with Leen’s API due to its first-mover advantage, allowing it to offer a more extensive integration library than competitors.

Funding

Leen recently announced that it had raised its first funding just last month in a $2.8M pre-seed round. 11.2 Capital led the funding effort, with participation from other firms with expertise in cybersecurity and Devtools, such as InnerLoop Capital and Preface Ventures, in addition to a list of notable operators and angel investors in the cybersecurity vertical, including Emilio Escobar (CISO, DataDog), Jeff Trudeau (CISO, Chime), Varun Badhwar (CEO, Endor Labs), Travis McPeak (CEO, Resourcely), Todd Dekinga (CISO, Zluri), Julie Tsai (LP, Rain Capital & ex-security leader at Roblox, Walmart, and Box), Adam Fletcher (CEO, Bit.io, acq. by Databricks) all taking part in the round.