Zenity, a leader in securing enterprise copilots and low-code development, is excited to announce a strategic investment led by M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund.
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Ben Kliger, Zenity CEO and co-founder, stated, “We are excited to be partnering with M12 to continue our mission of helping enterprises securely unleash the use of AI copilots and low-code development. Partnering with Microsoft is a strategic move for Zenity as Microsoft’s global reach, robust technology stack, and commitment to innovation align perfectly with our vision. This investment allows us to leverage Microsoft’s resources to accelerate our growth and work closely on a joint go-to-market strategy, enhancing the security and success of our mutual customers.”
As enterprises rush to adopt enterprise copilots and low-code development platforms, such as Microsoft’s own offerings of Microsoft Copilot, Power Platform, Copilot Studio, and Fabric, it is the first time that business users are at the forefront of, and in control of, business application development. In fact, Gartner estimates that by 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will have deployed GenAI-enabled applications in production environments, and also that by 2025, 70% of new applications developed by enterprises will use low-code/no-code technology.
This tectonic market shift in enterprise means that most application development is happening outside of IT. This means applications are being developed without traditional safeguards; namely IT involvement, software development lifecycle (SDLC), CI/CD security tooling, and traditional AppSec tools that rely on code scanning to spot vulnerabilities. This results in a tidal wave of Shadow Application Development.
Zenity researchers have found upwards of 79,000 applications being developed per organization using copilots and low-code platforms. This research further found that over 60% of these applications contain serious security vulnerabilities; be it hard-coded secrets, untrusted guests gaining privileged access to critical assets, over-exposing bots to the public internet, or apps and copilots with poorly configured authentication mechanisms.
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Zenity was founded in 2021 to bring application security controls to business-led development happening across these enterprise copilots and low-code development platforms. Zenity currently helps many Fortune 500 enterprises to understand what business users are building across their copilot and low-code estate, identifying security vulnerabilities and development and runtime, and helping to automatically remediate critical findings at scale.
“M12 is committed to driving innovation, particularly through AI and low-code development, which are key to enhancing innovation, productivity, and efficiency. Our investment in Zenity underscores the urgent need for security solutions as enterprise users increasingly utilize developer-level capabilities to process data at AI speeds, without existing safeguards for app security,” said Jason McBride, Investment Partner at M12. “Witnessing Zenity’s impact within Microsoft firsthand showcased the substantial benefits it provides to its customers, solidifying our decision to deepen our partnership with Zenity. This collaboration is pivotal as enterprises strive to securely leverage enterprise copilots and low-code/no-code platforms.”
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