ASants, a vendor specializing in attack surface management, recently announced the completion of its Pre-A financing round. The amount raised in this round is in the tens of millions of RMB, with Weizhi Capital leading the investment and Xiaomiao Fund participating.
Established in 2021, ASants focuses on the field of attack surface management. Yang Lijie, the company’s founder and CEO, stated that the founding team of ASants has extensive industry experience and has played various roles, such as the red team, blue team, and purple team, in security drills, gaining practical experience in combating and innovating. Based on these experiences, the founding team believes that the security industry’s previous focus on compliance has changed.
Customers now have an increasing demand for building risk-driven security systems, measuring true security risks, and defending against real threats. Therefore, ASants chooses to assess the risks exposed by enterprises from the perspective of attackers, helping companies establish a roadmap from threats to asset attacks and upgrade their security capabilities.
In terms of products, ASants has been focusing on the direction of attack surface management since its establishment. It has successively released the SeekShadow External Attack Surface Management System (in the direction of EASM) and the Attack Identification Breakthrough and Attack Simulation System (in the direction of BAS). Through the synergy of these two products, ASants covers the assessment of attack surfaces in areas such as boundaries, networks, applications, hosts, personnel, and data, helping enterprises identify and mitigate security risks.
Regarding commercial deployment, ASants’ key account customers are distributed in critical infrastructure sectors such as finance, telecommunications, energy, government, and state-owned enterprises. Additionally, the company has formed SaaS subscription solutions through collaborations with industry clouds and hybrid clouds. The company’s products have been implemented in dozens of benchmark customers in finance, telecommunications, and state-owned enterprises. It has also established partnerships with multiple mainstream industry cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud ecosystems. In 2022, the company’s SaaS product annual recurring revenue exceeded tens of millions of RMB.
Guo Xin, founding partner of Weizhi Capital, stated, “The essence of cybersecurity lies in the confrontation.” In recent years, with the continuous improvement of attack-side theories, products from the attack side have gradually gained a foundation. The market demand for “using attacks to stimulate defense” has been released through products, and many excellent entrepreneurial companies have emerged. ASants is a startup company in this field that many see as having mature concepts, believing that ASants’s solid products and excellent customer reputation will enable the startup to thrive within the field of cybersecurity and have the potential to become a leading company in the attack-side domain.