Why We're Going All In on Application Protection

When we started Impart, the cybersecurity world was obsessed with visibility. Every startup was racing to build the next agentless monitoring platform, building broad sets of product features across multiple areas while carefully sidestepping the unglamorous reality of actually securing anything. Coming from the world of WAF in the trenches of real security enforcement, this felt like the ultimate bait and switch—promising security while delivering glorified monitoring dashboards.

Fast-forward a few years, and the market has wised up. Security teams have moved beyond being impressed by dashboards—visibility is now just table stakes, a checkbox every vendor ticks. That broad, mile-wide-inch-deep approach? AI democratized it overnight. Anyone with a decent prompt can spin up a low quality product feature, leaving little value in products that do a little bit of many things.

What's left standing? The hard stuff. Today, visibility is a solved problem. But runtime protection? Still unsolved. And the reason it remains unsolved is the same reason it was unsolved before—because it requires conquering the hard technical challenges that make most vendors run the other way. Safety: not breaking applications in production. Speed: zero-latency protection that doesn't slow down your services. Accuracy: blocking real threats without drowning teams in false positives.

This is what we've always been focused on, what we've been winning with, and what we're doubling down on in the next phase. While others chased the easy visibility wins, we bet on the belief that security's real value has always lived in the enforcement layer—in actually stopping the bad things from happening. We're doubling down on that vision in our next phase of growth - and here's what that looks like for us.

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Building application protection for the security organization of the future

With our recent funding, we're going to be able to accelerate and scale our innovation at Impart. One of our strategic goals is to invest in the workflows and operating models of security organizations of the future, and to be the best possible solution for these types of modern, dev-forward security teams. To do this, we are investing in three key areas with our product roadmap:

Safety

The foundation of modern security operations is operating safely in production. The best way to do this is to build security controls the same way that modern software is built - with code.

Protections as Code: Our Code based rules seamlessly integrate with existing Infrastructure as Code workflows using Terraform, Pulumi, and other modern provisioning tools. Security policies deploy alongside infrastructure changes, ensuring protection is never an afterthought and is transparent for all. This provides immediate benefits including change safety through automated rollbacks, granular change control with approval workflows, and proper permissioning that matches your existing infrastructure access patterns.

Production-Safe Experimentation: Traditional security tools force teams to choose between speed and safety. Our safe testing framework eliminates this tradeoff by allowing security teams to test new detection rules and response actions against real production traffic without any risk of disruption. Teams can validate their security logic with confidence, knowing that false positives won't impact business operations.

Collaborative Workflows: By treating security policies like any other code, security teams can leverage the same collaborative workflows that make software development teams productive - pull requests for policy changes, code reviews for security logic, and continuous integration pipelines that test policies before deployment.

Speed

Modern threats move at AI speed, and security teams need to match that velocity. Our platform is designed around the principle that security teams should be able to observe, orient, decide, and act as quickly as software development teams ship code.

Closing the OODA Loop: We're building rapid feedback mechanisms that let security teams learn from real-world results and integrate those learnings immediately. When a new attack pattern emerges, our vision is for Impart to capture the behavior, analyze the context, and automatically suggest policy updates - all within the same day. This compressed OODA loop means security teams can stay ahead of attackers rather than constantly playing catch-up.

AI-Powered Policy Generation: Protections as Code unlocks the power of AI to dramatically reduce cycle times. When security policies are expressed as structured code, our AI can analyze threat intelligence, understand your application context, and automatically generate protection rules that would take security teams weeks to write manually. We're seeing customers compress policy development from months to days.

Automated Deployment Pipelines: Security teams can deploy new protections with the same velocity and confidence as software deployments. Our platform provides automated testing, canary releases for security rules, and instant rollback capabilities. This means moving from monitoring mode to active protection in days, not months.

Efficiency

Raw detection volume doesn't equal security effectiveness. We're investing in making security controls both smarter and to do more things for security teams.

Enhanced Detection Context: We're expanding our eBPF capabilities to provide richer visibility into application behavior. Beyond our current network monitoring, we're building support for syscall patterns, container lifecycle events, and process relationships. This enhanced context will mean fewer false positives and more accurate threat detection. When we understand not just what happened, but how it happened and what it affected, security teams can respond with surgical precision instead of broad defensive measures.

Expanded Response Arsenal: Detection without effective response leaves security teams frustrated. We're building a comprehensive set of automated response actions that go far beyond traditional blocking. Our roadmap includes capabilities for security teams to deploy honeypots to gather attack intelligence, redirect suspicious traffic for deeper analysis, challenge questionable requests with CAPTCHAs, quarantine affected systems to prevent lateral movement, and even automatically patch vulnerable systems when safe to do so. This expanded response capability will enable security teams to stop attacks at multiple stages rather than just at the perimeter.

The Future of Security is Here

The application security industry stands at an inflection point. The hard problems in security remain hard for a reason. They require deep technical expertise, significant engineering investment, and an unwavering commitment to getting the fundamentals right. That's exactly why we exist—to tackle what others won't, to build what others can't, and to deliver the runtime protection that security teams desperately need.

While the industry chases the next shiny object, and there are plenty of candidates for that (Code fixing MCP Server anyone?)  - we'll be busy building the future of application security—one where protection isn't an afterthought, but a core capability that actually provides real value to modern security teams.

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