Sym

Sym provides a platform that lets engineering teams embed security, privacy and governance workflows into their development process. Rather than each company rebuilding the same compliance and approval tooling, Sym offers a set of workflow templates and primitives covering the common core of these processes, plus integrations that connect those templates to a company's own services so teams can encode their organization-specific variations.

The product is aimed at developers: workflows and integrations are created through a Python SDK in a small number of lines of code. The company frames its approach as extending the DevOps model to security, giving engineers direct control over security workflows. As of the October 2020 Series A announcement, the product was in private beta, with general availability and a self-serve version planned for around the middle of 2021.

Founding story

Co-founder Yasyf Mohamedali previously served as CTO of health tech company Karuna Health, where he handled vendor reviews, security audits and other work in a high-compliance environment. His team repeatedly built small internal tools for these tasks, and he observed that other companies were duplicating the same effort. He initially set out to build and open source a single black-box toolset for HIPAA compliance, but concluded that while companies share a common core of security and governance workflows, each has meaningful variation, leading to Sym's template-and-integration approach.

Business model

Sym sells a developer-oriented software platform of security and governance workflow templates, primitives and integrations. At the time of its Series A the platform was in private beta with large customers signed on, and a self-serve offering was planned.

Latest developments

In October 2020 Sym raised a $9 million Series A led by Amplify Partners, following a $3 million seed round earlier that year led by Andy McLoughlin of Uncork Capital and Robin Vasan of Mango Capital. Management described the Series A as opportunistic and said it would not change the near-term roadmap, with the product remaining in private beta until roughly mid-2021.