Cequence Security

Cequence Security, founded in 2014 and originally operating under the name Stealth Security before rebranding, is a Santa Clara-based vendor focused on unified API security and bot management. Its core pitch is API-attack surface discovery — finding shadow and undocumented APIs across an enterprise, which is a real and growing gap as organizations ship more API-driven products faster than security teams can inventory them — combined with runtime protection against credential stuffing, scraping, and business-logic abuse.

The company has raised a substantial $170M across its funding history, with investors including Aramco Ventures, Prosperity7 Ventures, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, KPN Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, and it has built out an EMEA headquarters in Munich to support international enterprise customers. That level of capital and geographic expansion puts Cequence in the more mature tier of API-security specialists, competing directly with Salt Security, Noname Security (acquired by Akamai), and Wallarm.

For a CISO building out API security as its own discipline separate from traditional WAF coverage, Cequence’s combination of discovery and runtime bot/abuse protection addresses both the visibility problem and the exploitation problem in one platform. As with most vendors in this space, buyers should look for named reference customers and independent analyst positioning (Gartner, Forrester) rather than relying solely on vendor-reported detection statistics when evaluating fit.