Introducing Uleska: The Future of DevSecOps Automation Tools

Few industries have seen such scrutiny and shifts in recent years as cybersecurity. In an increasingly connected world, speed and agility throughout the development lifecycle are vital. But as a sector, we have yet to nail this down, and it’s hurting us. This status quo is what Uleska set out to challenge.

2020 unleashed a unique set of challenges for the whole world, and like many companies, we saw this time as an opportunity to connect with our community and refine our offering with developers and security teams at its heart. And now, we’re proud to introduce our new brand, the entity that we hope ties our goals, visions, and community needs together. 

Uleska is an application security automation and orchestration platform. We enable security teams to scale up their application security programs while increasing the effectiveness of their efforts. So how did we get here?

The uleska story so far

In 2015, Uleska founder Gary Robinson noticed that application security processes would constantly stall or break down because of internal process or culture, instead of technology. Security teams and development teams operated in silos. To tackle this, Gary started pitching some ideas for security orchestration around the community and in 2016, he successfully secured a £30,000 grant from Techstart to conduct research and get some market validation. The seeds of Uleska as a game-changing platform were being sown. 

In 2017 Gary left his job in enterprise banking to dedicate his time to this venture, as more and more people within the industry recognised the huge gap that needed to be closed in Application Security.

The problem, as Gary and others saw it, was that as companies build more cloud-native applications, the apps need to be secure by design, which only happens when engineers are empowered with security in their processes, and not jump through multiple vendor and “expert area” hoops to get there. And in 2017, this wasn’t happening.

Between 2017 and 2019, Uleska participated in several accelerator programs in the UK, including HutZero, CSITLabs, LORCA and TechNation, and in 2018 Uleska welcomed its first customer in PwC, who quickly became an advocate for the Uleska solution. It didn’t take long for the company to grow as we welcomed tech talent from around the world and onboarded one large enterprise after another. Little did anybody anticipate the digital tidal wave that was coming down the road.

The year the world stopped turning

In 2020, the impact of Covid-19 meant putting the brakes on security conferences and growth initiatives. And as many companies in the industry began to embrace DevOps and Digital Transformation, Uleska looked to revisit our go-to-market strategy. On the back of some very high-profile security lapses, the application security industry is increasingly fostering collaboration between security teams (which are notoriously understaffed) and engineering teams (that are more often than not overloaded). So it seemed natural that we build a solution that is entirely product-led to automate and integrate this collaboration. Something that teams can sign up for at their own pace and start automating their security testing right away.

A new position and unrivalled product offer

In 2021, we shifted our focus to build a state of the art self-service application security platform, which allows development and security teams to automate and orchestrate their application security testing. To do this, we hired a senior team of the best and brightest security, product and marketing experts in the industry, who came from heavy-hitters like Stack Overflow and Fortinet.

And our new brand rings in the new phase of Uleska. We stand for automation, giving teams full control over their process, enabling seamless collaboration, and, dare we say it, having fun while doing so.

Driving the future of DevSecOps forward through communities

The Uleska team strongly believes that communities can drive innovation by listening to and learning from each other. We want to be at the forefront and build that community to accelerate DevSecOps, and we’ve been hard at work engaging within cybersecurity communities over the past decade: Gary was voted to the global board of The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) for 2019-2020; Uleska’s head of marketing Raquel Soares spent four years leading marketing programs at Stack Overflow, the world’s largest developer community; our head of product Martin Hewitt is an engineer turned product leader with a deep rooted passion for and involvement in application security communities; and Jamie Graves, chief strategy officer (formerly VP at Fortinet) mentors multiple cybersecurity teams.

The Uleska way

We want to help development teams build safe software without compromising on speed. And there is so much that can be done to make that happen. Our automation platform is just the start, integrating security tools into CI/CD pipelines, giving teams full visibility about their security status, and improving the process where security and development can collaborate and save time. 

Doing right by our new community is key. That’s why it’s free to sign up to Uleska beta tools.