Through AI agents and automated processes, Echo is redefining how enterprises secure software to help save billions across the industry each year in vulnerability management and remediation costs.
Echo, an innovative startup building secure, enterprise-grade software infrastructure, announced today that it has raised $15 million in Seed funding. The round was led by Notable Capital and Hyperwise Ventures, with support from SVCI. Leveraging AI, Echo is pioneering a new approach to vulnerability management, ensuring container base images – the cornerstone of all applications – are built vulnerability-free. Echo’s mission is not just to make CVEs easier for companies to manage, but to make them a thing of the past. On the back of dozens of successful implementations, this funding will support Echo’s next phase of growth.
With AI now enabling code to be developed at an unprecedented pace, the attack surface for vulnerabilities is expanding in tandem. The more applications, the more vulnerabilities, and the greater the opportunity for cyber criminals to take advantage. This is illustrated by the growth in vulnerability exploitation, which has seen a 34% increase this year, correlating with research showing a 61% year-over-year surge in discovered software vulnerabilities.
As opposed to having customers prioritize and try to fix hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities, Echo delivers container images where CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) don’t exist by design. AI agents drive each step, from analyzing the functionality and essential elements of the original open source image to building a clean version from scratch and continuously patching it as new vulnerabilities are uncovered. The result is a clean image that mirrors, or echoes, the original’s exact functionality with a dramatically smaller attack surface. This allows enterprises to deploy secure, scalable applications with a clean foundation, enabling developers to focus on innovation and scaling, rather than trying to fix vulnerabilities inherited from code they didn’t even write.
“Echo was born out of a broken system. Having worked directly with Fortune 500 companies, major banks, and other enterprises on vulnerability management, we’ve understood that today’s tools all encounter the same challenge: As AI accelerates the volume of issues in cloud-native environments, businesses are spending millions on tools that chase and prioritize vulnerabilities rather than solve the root of the problem,” said Eilon Elhadad, Co-Founder and CEO of Echo. “Our CVE-free base images enable companies to build applications with a completely clean foundation – and via our AI agents, we make sure they stay that way. We’ve reduced the typical vulnerability remediation time from a current industry average of up to 120 days, to just 24 hours – a transformative turnaround for enterprises that’s reflected in customers’ existing scanners and CNAPP platforms.”
“Vulnerability management is a $17 billion industry. By offering secure-by-design infrastructure, the industry could unlock billions annually – not to mention the downstream cost savings of preventing potential breaches. This is what Echo is championing; a solution that allows businesses the luxury of not thinking about how to manage or mitigate vulnerabilities.” said Oren Yunger, Managing Partner at Notable Capital. “We are delighted to support Echo as they grow and continue to innovate in the cloud security space.”
One of Echo’s first customers, UiPath, has already seen instant results with the solution. “Echo’s product is a game changer for us. The vulnerability-free container base images have immediately cut our patching workload, saving us significant time and money,” said Scott Roberts, CISO of UiPath. “A recent survey found that 75% of developers spend more than 17 hours per-week on security related tasks, representing a staggering waste of resources and lost opportunities. Echo’s solution eliminates the need for labor-intensive vulnerability remediation, solving the problem at its source before our engineering teams have to try and deal with it.”
Through its AI-powered infrastructure, Echo’s secure image-building factory can produce and clean images significantly faster than manually-built alternatives. Unlike existing solutions in the market, Echo doesn’t require customers to switch to a non-standard operating software – instead, it’s a seamless process to implement the images, which means companies can easily opt-in/out.
Echo also streamlines the process of achieving and maintaining Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) compliance, a necessary standard for cloud-based companies to contract with U.S. Federal Government agencies. It does this by fast-tracking the requirements through its ready-to-deploy FIPS-validated (Federal Information Processing Standards) images. The solution strategically aligns security and engineering imperatives, changing the long-held narrative that FedRAMP is costly and a source of friction between these teams.
Echo was founded by Eilon Elhadad and Eylam Milner, serial entrepreneurs with a decade of cybersecurity experience and co-founders of Argon, acquired by Aqua Security for $100M in 2021. Leveraging their deep expertise in container and cloud security, vulnerability management, and enterprise needs, Eilon and Eylam are building a transformative, secure-by-design solution from the ground up, with a clear goal: to make secure infrastructure the new standard.
Credit: Jenny Rochlin
