From WhiteSource to Mend—A Rebrand Journey

When it comes to rebranding, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey

How important is a company name, really? Turns out that it is pretty important, especially if the name you currently have does not represent what the company has become, or where it is going. Our name is what defines the vision, spirit, and ethos of who we are and what we are trying to accomplish—the strategy, technology, and culture all rolled into one. It needs to be crisp, memorable, and legally acquirable. Guess what? It is harder than it looks…

We had a great creative agency shepherding and supporting us through the turns and twists we needed to make. Ultimately, the decision came down to a small team. Most importantly, company naming and re-branding is not a marketing initiative; it is very much a corporate one. In our case, our name represents the change in who the company has become; expanding our application security leadership from open source to all code with a mission focused on providing automation to take the burden off developers, while dramatically reducing the software attack surface. 

Formerly WhiteSource, Mend has grown dramatically since its start. A pioneer in software composition analysis (SCA), we began offering custom code security through static application security testing (SAST) in February, which today has enabled us to offer a more automated approach to application security. We protect organizations against vulnerabilities while reducing risk and increasing productivity for security and development teams.

Beginning the journey

A successful rebrand is a lot more than a new logo and a different color palette. It is about getting leadership and the company to rally around a singular mission and to focus the purpose and value we bring to customers, community, and our employees. It is the beginning of the journey, and ultimately, you can put together the ingredients but it is people and feelings attached to it that make a brand happen.

Why Mend

In the past two decades, most of application security has been set on detecting vulnerabilities and identifying problems, which is why in production we still see a lot of vulnerabilities appear. Developers are overwhelmed with the number of issues they have to address, with most requiring a lot of manual research to figure out what needs to be done to resolve them. 

This is where Mend comes in, with a goal of making application security more automated — focused on actually preventing, protecting, and fixing in the background to make it less of a developer burden. Our new look and name reflect this. 

It’s not just about the technology, however. Mend brings together developer and security teams who have historically struggled to reconcile at-odds job functions. We don’t just mend software, we also can mend the friction with the business requiring software engineering to deliver quality code on time with ever- increasing application security risks. Evolving WhiteSource to Mend reflects this. 

The logo itself is drawn in an abstract style. The logo can be seen as two hands coming together, signifying the joining of developers and security teams to enhance application security, as well as showing that Mend improves the way the two groups work together. It could also be viewed as a sewing stitch or even a zipper. We wanted to denote the concept of mending, portraying this with the look and feel. It represents a seamless process, the technology automatically underpinning the security challenges it addresses. The goal of the design is also to make it welcoming on a global scale, something people can understand and relate to no matter where they’re from. We wanted to stand out and be inviting, and the colors aqua, ocean, and navy capture this with a feel of freshness and innovation to resonate with security and engineering leaders.

Mending application security challenges with automation

We are here to disrupt the existing application security market by redefining how customers can secure their applications. Mend not only identifies vulnerabilities, we mend them using automation. The name Mend and the new look of our brand has evolved to match this approach and our focus to help enterprises deliver secure software, faster.

Discover more about Mend’s Application Security Platform here