Traceable rolled out a free version of its API security software just a year after former AppDynamic CEO Jyoti Bansal launched the company with $20 million in funding and an enterprise application security platform. Alongside the free version, the startup also announced self-deployment that takes less than 10 minutes across all tiers: free, teams, and enterprise Traceable AI.

Traceable developed a platform that uses distributed tracing technology to trace end-to-end application activity — from the user and session through the application code. Meanwhile, TraceAI, the platform’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology, analyzes this data to learn normal application behavior and to detect activity that deviates from the norm. Businesses can then use Traceable’s forensic data and insights to analyze attack attempts and perform root cause analysis.

The free API security tier uses AI and ML-based anomaly detection to detect and block known threats (such as the OWASP Top 10) and unknown threats with no signature, which helps eliminate false positives that contribute to security team alert fatigue.

“Some of the key features offered are continuous discovery and inventory of APIs, ML-powered API and web protection, and real-time API vulnerability detection,” Traceable CMO Ashish Kuthiali wrote in response to questions.

The free version helps teams that don’t have the budget to deploy an enterprise-grade API security platform, he added. “The Traceable AI solution brings a fundamentally new approach required to address these challenges and it is our hope to drive broad understanding and adoption on how to understand and manage the API security challenges using this solution,” he said.

Customers can also upgrade to the team or enterprise tiers for large-scale environments and more advanced features.

API security is a particularly hot sector of the larger security market due, in part, to the COVID-19 pandemic, which sped up companies’ already-in-progress moves to microservices and cloud-native applications. This magnified the importance of security at the code and workload level.

In an earlier interview, Bansal called the code and software layer the “next frontier” in cybersecurity. And this, he said, represents a $10 billion or more market opportunity for his API security company.

“This systems and infrastructure layer is where all the cybersecurity focus has been for the last 15, 20 years,” Bansal said. “Now, the next frontier becomes all about code and software.”