WhiteSource Has New Security Directions, New Name: Meet ‘Mend’

‘We are embarking on a new journey. We’re taking all of this as an opportunity to reintroduce ourselves,’ co-founder and CEO Rami Sass tells CRN.

WhiteSource has a new name now that it’s heading in new security directions.

The Boston- and Tel Aviv, Israel-based company over the past year—via a recent infusion of $75 million in additional funding and key acquisitions—has been evolving from open-source software composition analysis to a “bigger and different” security company that offers a more broad application security platform, said co-founder and CEO Rami Sass.

As a result, WhiteSource is changing its name to Mend to better reflect its new direction and mission, said Sass. The company is also using its renaming as an occasion to unveil what it’s calling the “industry’s first automated remediation for custom code security issues,” as well as a more integrated security platform.

“We are embarking on a new journey,” Sass recently told CRN. “We’re taking all of this as an opportunity to reintroduce ourselves.”

Mend, as the company is now called as of this week, has raised a total of $120 million in funding since its founding in 2011, of which $75 million was raised in April 2021.

Earlier this year, the company unveiled its acquisition of DefenseCode of Croatia and Xanitizer of Germany as part of its push beyond software composition analysis, which secures open-source code, to providing custom-code security via static application security testing.

Alhough the company did not release current revenue figures, it has said that revenue has grown by 800 percent over the past three years with 350 new customers added during the same time period. Mend has more 1,000 customers, including about 25 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, the company said in a statement.

Mend also didn’t release figures related to its channel sales, but executives said the company works closely with systems integrators and it’s planning to strengthen and deepen its channel ties moving forward.

“We re-launched our partner program last year and it has been very successful,” Rick Riccio Sr., director of channels at Mend, said in a statement to CRN.

“We are moving towards a full channel-led business model over the next two years and our rebrand to Mend signifies the new company we have become. We have developed very strong relationships with elite cybersecurity services companies like GuidePoint Security and Defy Security, who are trusted advisers and experts relied upon by their enterprise customers.”

In a press release, Sass made clear that the company is evolving along with the cyberthreats now confronting companies and others.

“Attackers are increasingly targeting applications as the weakest link to go after organizations,

and at the same time, pressure to deliver software faster has never been higher,” Sass said. “Organizations face undeniable tension to do both, better. Mend breaks the trade-off between security and development delivery timelines by providing a solution that automates the reduction of the software attack surface while removing most of the burden of application security, allowing development teams to deliver quality, secure code faster.”