Obsidian Security, which helps companies secure SaaS apps, raises a $90M Series C led by Menlo Ventures, bringing its total funding to $119.5M
While businesses have embraced software-as-a-service (SaaS) in a massive way, the questions around how to best secure the use of data …
Context & Ripple Effects
Obsidian Security's $90M Series C lands mid-way through a funding race in SaaS security: AppOmni raised a $40M Series B in April 2021 and then a $70M Series C led by Thoma Bravo just two months after Obsidian's round, putting the two rivals at nearly identical total funding ($123M vs. $119.5M). The category's premise — that companies adopting SaaS at scale need dedicated tooling to secure data across those apps — was drawing nine-figure checks from growth investors like Menlo Ventures and Thoma Bravo alike.
What makes this round worth revisiting is where Obsidian went next: four years later it raised an $85M Series D at a $1.1B valuation selling security for AI agents rather than SaaS apps, making this 2022 round the base of a pivot that carried the company past unicorn territory.
First-order effects
- Obsidian gets $90M from Menlo Ventures to scale its SaaS security platform, directly matching the war chest AppOmni assembled weeks later — both now funded to chase the same enterprise buyers.
Second-order effects
- With Obsidian and AppOmni each holding ~$120M totals, competition shifts from proving the category to winning accounts on coverage breadth and pricing, pressuring smaller SaaS-security entrants and adjacent data-protection vendors like Odaseva, which raised its own $54M Series C for Salesforce-specific protection.
Third-order effects
- Obsidian's later Series D shows the structural play: a security vendor built on SaaS app integrations can re-point those integrations at AI agents as enterprise workloads shift, turning the 2022 SaaS-security land grab into distribution for the next attack surface.
The trend: SaaS security specialists are converting deep app-integration footholds into AI-agent security platforms, with venture capital funding the transition ahead of enterprise demand.