Cequence Security: Providing Security Solutions to Protect Your Applications with Advanced Technology

“Our mission is to transform application security by consolidating multiple innovative security functions within an open, AI-powered software platform.”

An application security solution aims to prevent data or code within the app from being stolen or hijacked. It encompasses the security considerations that happen during application development and design, but it also involves systems and approaches to protect apps after they get deployed. Application security may include hardware, software, and procedures that identify or minimize security vulnerabilities.

In view of the foregoing, we’re delighted to present Cequence Security.

Cequence Security provides an AI-driven software platform that can be deployed on premises or in the cloud, wherever critical apps are deployed. The platform automatically discovers all web, mobile, and API-based apps deployed across your organization, detects attacks against those apps, and automatically mitigates attacks before they are successful. The award winning platform prevents bot attacks focused on business logic abuse (such as credential stuffing, site scraping, fake account creation, and more) as well as attacks designed to exploit both known and unknown application vulnerabilities.

The company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The firm also has a branch in Munich, Germany.

Cequence Security Leadership (Larry Link, CEO, Shreyans Mehta, CTO, & Ameya Talwalkar, CPO), spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. What is the reason behind the genesis of your company?

While working at Symantec together, we (Shreyans and Ameya) recognized that legacy application security products were becoming increasingly ineffective in stopping complex cyber-attacks. We determined that there was a need for advanced, AI powered technology to solve these problems. This need led us to create Cequence Security. We were then fortunate to have Larry Link join the company as CEO after a very successful tenure at Palo Alto Networks, where he grew the company to $500M and positioned it for a successful IPO.

Q. Does your company have a core technology or a flagship product?

Yes, we’re protecting customers with our innovative Application Security Platform (ASP), an open, container- based software platform powered by CQAI, a patented analytics engine that combines applied artificial intelligence, machine learning, and behavioral analysis to deliver three key values to customers.

First, it automatically discovers all web, mobile, and API-based applications deployed across the entire organization. This is a huge benefit to security teams, because they are often unaware of all the apps deployed that must be protected.

Second, the platform automatically ingests a copy of all traffic between external clients and internal applications. CQAI then continuously performs multi-dimensional analysis of the entire application transaction to determine the source, target, and underlying behavior and intent of each transaction.

Finally, CQAI works in conjunction with CQ botDefense and CQ appFirewall – two security tools integrated within the platform – to stop attacks by automatically applying various policy-based mitigation techniques, including blocking, deception, rate limiting, and more.

Q. Could you elaborate on the working of your product(s)?

The traffic targeting customer applications could include malicious bots and good bots, as well as malicious humans and good humans. Understanding the profile of this application traffic is one of the unique capabilities of the Cequence ASP solution – and the integrated CQAI engine. It’s able to analyze the underlying intent and behavior of each web, mobile, and API-based application transaction, then create a unique fingerprint for transactions with malicious intent. These malicious transactions can then be automatically mitigated to stop the attack before it achieves its objective. All of this happens in near real-time. As a side benefit, there are no changes required to any applications, and there is no performance impact when deploying Cequence ASP.

Q. Do you target specific industries or are your products more generic?

The Cequence ASP solution protects organizations across many vertical markets. The common characteristic of all its customers is that they all rely on the web, mobile, and API-based applications to connect customers, partners, suppliers, and run their business. Therefore, these apps must be protected from attacks.

Q. Since AI is an emerging technology, there are few who contain the skills or training necessary for AI development. How do you source people with the right skills?

The firm has been successful in attracting software engineers with a strong data science background, enabling them to contribute to the development and enhancement of our innovative AI-based security capabilities.

Q. Any company, big or small, must have a sense of authenticity and originality to succeed. Is your company a leader or a follower?

We are disrupting the application security market by delivering an AI-powered platform that can be deployed on-premises, or in the cloud, and scale to protect any size organization. Just as important, the platform can support multiple integrated security functions to help simplify security architectures and management. This has never been done before, so we are definitely a leader in bringing much needed innovation to application security.

Q. How do you sustain a culture of innovation amidst a continuously evolving market?

As a silicon valley-based company, we strive to challenge our team and maintain a culture of innovation to ensure that we continue to attract top talent and also continue to deliver the most powerful AI-based security solution in the market.

Meet the Leaders Behind Cequence Security’s Rise

Larry Link serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Cequence Security and has an overall experience of 25 years in the field of executive experience creating, building, and managing profitable enterprise technology businesses. He also has served as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Palo Alto Networks. He ran Worldwide Sales at Neoteris from inception through its acquisition by Juniper Networks in April 2004. He holds a BS degree in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University.

Shreyans Mehta, Co-founder, serves as the Chief Technical Officer of Cequence Security. Shreyans Mehta is an innovator in network security and holds several patents in the field. Before co-founding the firm, he was Architect and Technical Director at Symantec, where he led the development of one of the most advanced networks security platforms and intrusion prevention technologies based on real-time packet inspection and cloud-based big data analytics. Shreyans holds a postgraduate degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.

Ameya Talwalkar, Co-founder, serves as the Chief Product Officer of Cequence Security. He has an experience of 10 years and has built strong engineering teams specializing in enterprise and consumer security in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Madrid, Pune, and Chengdu. Before co-founding the company, he was the Director of Engineering at Symantec. Ameya holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Sardar Patel College of Engineering (SPCE), Mumbai University.

"We are disrupting the application security market by delivering an AI-powered platform that can be deployed on-premises, or in the cloud, and scale to protect any size organization.”