Red-Hot Security AppDev Startup Snyk Raises $150M

‘We are seeing the market embrace developer-first application security to help tackle the increasing cybersecurity concerns that come with digital transformation,’ says Snyk CEO Peter McKay.

Security application development startup Snyk, which is led by Veeam’s former co-CEO Peter McKay, has raised $150 million to drive product innovation and global expansion. The fast-growing startup says its valuation is now more than $1 billion.

McKay said the $150 million will “accelerate” the company’s ability to transform the way application security is approached and delivered to software-driven enterprises.

“With rapid 2019 revenue and customer growth from both individual users and scaling development teams, we are seeing the market embrace developer-first application security to help tackle the increasing cybersecurity concerns that come with digital transformation,” said Snyk CEO McKay in a statement.

Last year, Snyk drove more than 400 percent year-over-year revenue growth and won new deals with large customer including Google, Salesforce, Intuit and Nordstrom. In late 2019, the company raised $70 million in a funding round on top of another $22 million of capital investment it secured in 2018.

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“This new funding will help us achieve even faster product innovation, deeper expansion into EMEA and APJ, and broader, impactful support of the DevSecOps community,” said McKay in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday.

Founded in 2015, the London-based company is a developer-first security specialist that helps businesses quickly develop, scale and secure applications. Snyk specially targets developers rather than security IT personnel to help them fix security issues in their source code as well as their Kubernetes and container applications. The company providers open source tools that helps developers find vulnerabilities in code from the likes of Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab or CI/CD tool.

There are currently more than 400,000 developers who are leveraging Snyk worldwide, according to the company. Snyk has offices in Boston, Santa Clara, Calif., Tel Aviv and Ontario, Canada.

In terms of leadership, McKay is a highly regarded industry veteran who was Co-CEO of Veeam Software, which is set to be acquired by private equity firm Insight Partners for $5 billion, for around three years. He joined became CEO of Snyk in 2019 after being on the company’s board for several years. In addition to Veeam, McKay has held top executive roles over the years for the likes of IBM and VMware.

“[The $150 million will] accelerate our vision of enabling businesses to continuously build security into their application development process and culture,” said McKay.

The company integrates into the technologies and platforms that cloud application developers prefer, prioritizing the developer experience to encourage adoption. Snyk has tight integration into existing developer workflows and source control -- including GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab – to enable efficient security workflows and reduces mean-time-to-fix. Snyk also offers best of breed vulnerability intelligence, validated by the world’s largest cloud, financial and security customers and partners.

The new $150 million in funding was led by New York-based equity firm Stripes. Other leading investors in Snyk include Accel, Coatue, Tiger Global, BoldStart, GV, Canaan, Trend Forward, Amity and Salesforce Ventures.