With a successful beta at its back and paying customers onboard, Denver application security startup StackHawk announced Tuesday that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding.
The oversubscribed round was led by Sapphire Ventures and included returning seed backers Foundry Group, Costanoa Ventures, Flybridge Capital and Matchstick Ventures.
The company’s product gives engineering teams a scanning capability that helps them find application security vulnerabilities before they get into production.
StackHawk launched its beta program in May, shortly after it closed a $2.5 million seed round in March. After a successful trial period, the company opened its product up to the general public in September and is focused on converting paying customers.
With that recent success, the company aims to use this round to continue its product development, invest in its go-to-market teams and support Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP), the open-source project that the company's platform is built upon.
In July, StackHawk announced that Simon Bennetts, founder of ZAP, joined its team. ZAP is an open-source dynamic application security testing tool that helps users find security bugs in their code; it is also the underlying scanning technology for the StackHawk product.
Co-founder and CEO Joni Klippert said the need for the company’s product has only increased during Covid-19.
“If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that companies have to deliver amazing digital experiences to be competitive,” Klippert told Colorado Inno. “That means they are pushing software to production constantly and it is our job to help them push secure software to production.”
As they scale the team, Klippert said StackHawk will build out its sales and marketing teams in Denver and elsewhere. As the pandemic has forced StackHawk to go remote, Klippert said it has also created opportunities to hire outside of the city.
“What it means for our business is being able to hire the absolute best talent on the market,” she said.
While Klippert said the capital will be crucial to StackHawk’s growth, she added that Sapphire’s expertise in developer-first tooling and security products was a key driver in raising this round.
“With the rise of DevOps, companies have shifted to the frequent release of software and reliance on automation. How companies approach application security should be no different," said David Hartwig, managing director at Sapphire Ventures, in a statement.
StackHawk was previously named to Colorado Inno’s 20 Startups to Watch in 2020 list and was a 2020 Inno on Fire honoree.
