Press Release – May 22, 2024

HoundDog.ai Closes Seed Round, Launches AI-Powered Code Scanner to Identify Sensitive Data Exposures During Development While Slashing Compliance Costs

HoundDog.ai protects code against common weakness enumeration categories linked to major data breaches and not addressed by other code scanners. 

SAN FRANCISCO — May 22, 2024 — HoundDog.ai, the company implementing data security and privacy controls at the code level, announced today the completion of a $3.1M seed round led by E14 Fund, Mozilla Ventures and ex/ante, with additional angel investors participating. The funding announcement coincides with the general availability of the HoundDog.ai cloud platform, which helps organizations apply data security and privacy controls as developers are writing code; this proactive approach helps organizations stay ahead of potential threats and reduces the financial and operational costs of addressing these vulnerabilities after they are discovered in production. 

Protecting Sensitive Data is Paramount

In 2023, 92% of all data compromised involved customer and employee personally identifiable information (PII) record types, according to an IBM report. Sensitive data leaks can ruin customer relationships and be very expensive to operationally and legally remediate.

HoundDog.ai offers an AI-powered code scanner designed to implement a proactive, shift-left strategy for the protection of sensitive data and for ensuring privacy compliance. This scanner continuously detects vulnerabilities that SAST scanners overlook—vulnerabilities that expose sensitive data in plaintext across various mediums, such as logs, files, tokens, cookies, or through third-party systems. 

Additionally, HoundDog.ai tracks and visualizes the flow of sensitive data in real time, documenting processing activities. HoundDog.ai can scan more than 3 million lines of code in less than 3 minutes. It alerts users when new data elements are introduced, based on their sensitivity levels, and facilitates the generation of Records of Processing Activities (RoPA) and other privacy-related reports with just a few clicks, thereby eliminating the manual and error-prone processes traditionally used for this task.

HoundDog.ai uses artificial intelligence (AI) to magnify the platform’s coverage and accuracy. Generative AI is used to evaluate tokens for sensitive data handling, achieving higher precision rates. This complements the scanner’s pre-defined sensitive data definitions encompassing personally identifiable information (PII), personally identifiable financial information (PIFI) and protected health information (PHI). 

***See how it works. Watch these interactive demos.***

“Most companies detect sensitive data leaks through logs, files or third-party systems when it’s too late, after damage has occurred,” said Amjad Afanah, founder and CEO of HoundDog.ai. “Additionally, documenting data flows for GDPR compliance proves to be a manual, error-prone process that often fails to accurately reflect the reality of constantly changing codebases. With HoundDog.ai, companies can take a proactive stance in ensuring their sensitive data is protected and eliminate costly, reactive and error-prone processes for privacy compliance.”

New Features of HoundDog.ai Cloud Platform, Available in GA Today

The HoundDog.ai cloud platform, launched today, provides a consolidated view of vulnerabilities across all code repositories and automatically sends actionable security notifications in Jira and Slack. Prior to this release, customers had integrated the scanner into their CI pipelines, which surfaced the security findings on security dashboards. While this may continue to be the preferred model for many organizations that have standardized security scanning workflows in GitHub and GitLab, the cloud platform enables more intricate workflows that rely on ticketing systems for vulnerability tracking and, of course, supports privacy-related workflows. 

Consequently, HoundDog.ai now offers alerts on new data elements and automatic generation of RoPA reports for GDPR compliance. Support for Python, TypeScript and JavaScript has been added, in addition to the existing support for Java, C#, and structured languages like SQL, GraphQL and OpenAPI. Visit HoundDog.ai for a full list of features and capabilities.

Investors and Customers Offer Insights on HoundDog.ai

“Business models built around adding AI to existing products are hamstrung from the outset,” said Habib Haddad, managing director at E14 Fund. “We’re looking for the entrepreneurs and products that are using AI to unlock value in ways that go far beyond incremental improvements to existing offerings, and that’s what HoundDog.ai has done. Amjad and his team have incorporated AI to dramatically reduce privacy compliance costs and simplify the proactive detection of sensitive data exposure with an efficient, frictionless code scanner.  They’re fulfilling a true need in a market ripe with growth potential.”

“As an increasing number of companies turn to AI-generated code to accelerate development, embedding security best practices and ensuring the security of the generated code becomes essential,” said Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit and an investor in the round. “HoundDog.ai is leading the way in securing PII data early in the development cycle, making it an indispensable component of any AI code generation workflow. This is the reason I chose to invest in this company.”

“Companies handling sensitive data need a code scanner that is both fast and integrates with existing security dashboards, such as the GitLab Vulnerability Report in our case,” said Bryan Kaplan, EVP, chief information and security officer at Juvare. “It needs to provide peace of mind by ensuring that sensitive data does not accidentally leak into logs, files, or third-party systems, even with high-frequency updates to the codebases. It’s this capability that drew us to HoundDog.ai, as no one else is presently offering this.”

“The Cacilian platform has helped hundreds of customers improve their security posture with its comprehensive penetration testing capabilities,” said Chase Bowman, vice president of security testing and engineering at Prescient Security. We are excited to extend the coverage of our findings to include sensitive data leaks through logs, files, and third-party systems, which can be extremely costly to address in production, via our integration with HoundDog.ai. HoundDog’s AI-powered scanner can be plugged into the CI pipeline for continuous — and not just point-in-time — detection, and can drastically simplify datamap generation for privacy compliance.”

About HoundDog.ai

HoundDog.ai helps organizations protect sensitive data from exposure and streamline compliance workflows by integrating data security and privacy controls at the code level from the very start. With its AI-powered code scanner, HoundDog.ai detects code logic suspected of handling sensitive data, flags vulnerabilities where PII data is exposed in plaintext (in logs, files, and 3rd party systems) and automates the generation of sensitive datamaps and RoPA reports for GDPR. HoundDog.ai supports popular languages and integrates with existing tools, CI pipelines and developer workflows. More at www.hounddog.ai.