Security Startup Synack raises $21.25 Million from Microsoft and Others

Posted on April 12, 2017

Synack a startup which offers Hacking-as-a-Service has raised the amount of $21.25 million in Series C Funding. The funding round was led by Microsoft Ventures, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and telecoms group Singtel. Previous investors GGV Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers participated the funding round.

The California-based startup was founded in 2016 by Indo-American Jay Kaplan and Mark Kuhr. Synack is a human-powered security solution offering scalable continuous testing for enterprise applications and networks. The security startup that has created a unique Crowd Security Intelligence™ platform that delivers the most secure, continuous, scalable, security assessment on the market.

Synack’s security-as-a-service offering redefines the traditional static, signature-based model of security testing by providing a proactive, adversarial perspective of the enterprise IT environment.

Commenting on his startup, Jay Kaplan, Synack co-founder and chief executive, said: “We have an extremely rigorous vetting approach, using interviews, background checks, skills assessments, and more. We have a passport for every researcher in our network on file, a far cry from the open, public bug bounty programs where all you need is an email address to sign up. We pay our researchers well and we do it within 24 hours of a vulnerability being verified.”

Synack has customers across the board, financial services, retail, and government sectors have been its strongest to date. The startup claims that is has doubled revenue quarterly for 12 consecutive quarters and experienced a 300% increase in year-over-year bookings over the last four quarters.

Post funding round, Gary Steele, Chief Executive, Proofpoint will be joining Synack’s board of directors alongside Microsoft Ventures. The start-up will now work with Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Singtel’s sales organisations to sell the platform to their customers.

The fresh funds will be used to further develop the product, scale adoption across the U.S. and Europe, enter the Asia Pacific region, and continue to recruit hackers. Read more about Indian Startup Ecosystem.

Security Startup Synack raises $21.25 Million from Microsoft and Others