As enterprises speed up the deployment of LLMs and agentic workflows, they’re hitting a vital infrastructure bottleneck: the container base photographs powering these purposes are riddled with inherited safety debt.
Echo, an Israeli startup, is saying a $35 million in Sequence A funding right now (bringing its to-date whole to $50 million in funding) to repair this by basically reimagining how cloud infrastructure is constructed.
The spherical was led by N47, with participation from Notable Capital, Hyperwise Ventures, and SentinelOne. However the actual story isn't the capital—it's the corporate’s formidable purpose to exchange the chaotic open-source provide chain with a managed, "secure-by-design" working system.
The Hidden Working System of the Cloud
To grasp why Echo issues, you first have to grasp the invisible basis of the fashionable web: container base photographs.
Consider a "container" like a transport field for software program. It holds the applying code (what the builders write) and the whole lot that code must run (the "base picture"). For a non-technical viewers, one of the best ways to grasp a base picture is to check it to a brand-new laptop computer. If you purchase a pc, it comes with an Working System (OS) like Home windows or macOS pre-installed to deal with the fundamentals—speaking to the onerous drive, connecting to Wi-Fi, and working packages. With out it, the pc is ineffective.
Within the cloud, the bottom picture is that Working System. Whether or not an organization like Netflix or Uber is constructing a easy internet app or a posh community of autonomous AI brokers, they depend on these pre-built layers (like Alpine, Python, or Node.js) to outline the underlying runtimes and dependencies.
Right here is the place the chance begins. Not like Home windows or macOS, that are maintained by tech giants, most base photographs are open-source and created by communities of volunteers. As a result of they’re designed to be helpful to everybody, they’re usually full of "bloat"—a whole lot of additional instruments and settings that the majority corporations don't really want.
Eylam Milner, Echo’s CTO, makes use of a stark analogy to elucidate why that is harmful: "Taking software program simply from the open supply world, it's like taking a pc discovered on the sidewalk and plugging it into your [network]."
Historically, corporations attempt to repair this by downloading the picture, scanning it for bugs, and making an attempt to "patch" the holes. However it’s a dropping battle. Echo’s analysis signifies that official Docker photographs usually include over 1,000 recognized vulnerabilities (CVEs) the second they’re downloaded. For enterprise safety groups, this creates an not possible sport of "whac-a-mole," inheriting infrastructure debt earlier than their engineers write a single line of code.
The "Enterprise Linux" Second for AI
For Eilon Elhadad, Echo’s co-founder and CEO, the business is repeating historical past. "Precisely what's occurred up to now… all people run with Linux, after which they transfer to Enterprise Linux," Elhadad advised VentureBeat. Simply as Crimson Hat professionalized open-source Linux for the company world, Echo goals to be the "enterprise AI native OS"—a hardened, curated basis for the AI period.
"We see ourselves within the AI native period, the muse of the whole lot," says Elhadad.
The Tech: A "Software program Compilation Manufacturing unit"
Echo will not be a scanning device. It doesn’t search for vulnerabilities after the very fact. As an alternative, it operates as a "software program compilation manufacturing unit" that rebuilds photographs from scratch.
In accordance with Milner, Echo’s strategy to eliminating vulnerabilities depends on a rigorous, two-step engineering course of for each workload:
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Compilation from Supply: Echo begins with an empty canvas. It doesn’t patch present bloated photographs; it compiles binaries and libraries straight from supply code. This ensures that solely important parts are included, drastically lowering the assault floor.
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Hardening & Provenance (SLSA Degree 3): The ensuing photographs are hardened with aggressive safety configurations to make exploitation troublesome. Crucially, the construct pipeline adheres to SLSA Degree 3 requirements (Provide-chain Ranges for Software program Artifacts), making certain that each artifact is signed, examined, and verifiable.
The result’s a "drop-in substitute." A developer merely adjustments one line of their Dockerfile to level to Echo’s registry. The appliance runs identically, however the underlying OS layer is mathematically cleaner and freed from recognized CVEs.
AI Defending In opposition to AI
The necessity for this stage of hygiene is being pushed by the "AI vs. AI" safety arms race. Unhealthy actors are more and more utilizing AI to compress exploit home windows from weeks right down to days. Concurrently, "coding brokers"—AI instruments that autonomously write software program—have gotten the primary turbines of code, usually statistically deciding on outdated or susceptible libraries from open supply.
To counter this, Echo has constructed a proprietary infrastructure of AI brokers that autonomously handle vulnerability analysis.
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Steady Monitoring: Echo’s brokers monitor the 4,000+ new CVEs added to the Nationwide Vulnerability Database (NVD) month-to-month.
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Unstructured Analysis: Past official databases, these brokers scour unstructured sources like GitHub feedback and developer boards to determine patches earlier than they’re extensively printed.
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Self-Therapeutic: When a vulnerability is confirmed, the brokers determine affected photographs, apply the repair, run compatibility assessments, and generate a pull request for human evaluate.
This automation permits Echo’s engineering group to keep up over 600 safe photographs—a scale that might historically require a whole lot of safety researchers.
Why It Issues to the CISO
For technical decision-makers, Echo represents a shift from "imply time to remediation" to "zero vulnerabilities by default."
Dan Garcia, CISO of EDB, famous in a press launch that the platform "saves not less than 235 developer hours per launch" by eliminating the necessity for engineers to analyze false positives or patch base photographs manually.
Echo is already securing manufacturing workloads for main enterprises like UiPath, EDB, and Varonis. As enterprises transfer from containers to agentic workflows, the power to belief the underlying infrastructure—with out managing it—often is the defining attribute of the subsequent technology of DevSecOps.
Pricing for Echo's resolution will not be publicly listed, however the firm says on its web site it costs "primarily based on picture consumption, to make sure it scales with the way you truly construct and ship software program."
