Mesh7

Founded in 2018 by Amit Jain and Pratik Roychowdhury, Mesh7 operated from Sunnyvale, California, as a specialized cloud-native application security company. The firm focused on securing the increasingly complex world of modern applications built on microservices and communicating via APIs. Its core offering was the 'API Security Mesh,' a platform developed to provide deep visibility and security for interactions between application components. This addressed a critical need for development, security, and operations teams to monitor, observe, and protect cloud-native, API-driven applications from threats.

The Mesh7 platform was engineered to function at the application layer (Layer 7), delivering contextual insights into API behavior. A key technical aspect of its solution was its foundation on Envoy, an open-source Layer 7 proxy designed for large, service-oriented architectures. This allowed Mesh7 to offer high-fidelity understanding of how, when, and where microservices communicated through APIs, even across multi-cloud environments. The solution empowered organizations to discover APIs, understand their behavior, and enforce security policies to protect against breaches and reduce blind spots. Its clients were primarily information security leaders, cloud application security practitioners, and application owners who needed to ensure security and compliance for their distributed applications.

After raising $5.9 million from investors including March Capital, The Fabric, Juniper Networks, and Splunk Ventures, Mesh7 demonstrated significant traction in the DevSecOps space. This success culminated in its acquisition by VMware, which was announced in March 2021 and closed on March 31, 2021. The undisclosed deal aimed to integrate Mesh7's contextual API behavior security product directly into the VMware Tanzu Service Mesh. This strategic acquisition enabled VMware to enhance its modern application connectivity services, providing customers with a more robust, integrated solution for deploying and securing distributed services and applications.

Keywords: API security, cloud-native security, microservices security, DevSecOps, application layer security, VMware Tanzu, service mesh, Envoy proxy, API observability, API discovery, network management software, contextual API behavior, distributed applications, multi-cloud security, application security mesh, Amit Jain, Pratik Roychowdhury, Layer 7 security, modern application connectivity, Kubernetes security, application resiliency, security compliance