Denver’s StackHawk, a SaaS startup that allows engineers to find and fix application security bugs at any stage of the development pipeline, announced Wednesday that it has closed a $2.5 million financing round.
The round was co-led by Costanoa Ventures and Foundry Group, along with Flybridge Capital and Matchstick Ventures, bringing the company’s total funding to $4.6 million since July 2019.
Co-founder and CEO Joni Klippert said the round was motivated by the success of the company’s early access product, along with backing from investors.
“From talking to investors, they were supportive of us continuing to grow and make an investment in product,” she said.
StackHawk will use the funds to build out its team, while also furthering development on its product as it prepares to go to market.
The company’s product is multi-faceted, first giving engineers a scanning capability that helps them find security vulnerabilities before they get into production. From there, the company’s web experience allows engineers to view and manage the vulnerabilities.
In addition to the funding round, StackHawk also announced its limited early access program, allowing interested developers to use the product before it is released into general availability.
“With StackHawk, our customers are finding application security bugs with every code commit,” Klippert said. “This is exciting because engineers typically aren’t informed of security vulnerabilities until months and months after they’ve deployed the code to production. Now, they can find them while they’re writing code, and keep the vulnerabilities from ever entering production.”
Klippert said the company will greatly benefit from customers trying the product in these early stages, with StackHawk eyeing a free beta release by the end of the summer.
“Customers get to help inform our roadmap and we get to learn their greatest pain points,” she said.
The company has 11-full time employees and Klippert anticipates reaching around 15 employees by the end of the year. StackHawk was recently named to Colorado Inno’s 20 Startups to Watch in 2020 list.
In the near-term, the company is focused on finishing its product and getting it into the hands of paying customers. Looking beyond that, Klippert said the company hopes to represent a sea change in application security.
“Our big goal is to put app security in the hands of engineers,” she said.
