Seattle-based cybersecurity startup StepSecurity has raised a $3 million seed round.
With the funding, announced Wednesday, the startup wants to expand its services. According to a news release, StepSecurity is hiring in engineering, sales and marketing.
StepSecurity, founded in 2022, focuses on protecting code made on the developer platform GitHub, specifically code developed through "CI/CD," or continuous integration and continuous delivery. It's a method of development that eliminates much of the manual labor in developing code and allows developers to make code changes that are automatically tested and delivered.
"Enterprises typically have robust application and cloud security solutions. However, CI/CD, the crucial link between these two environments, remains unprotected," Varun Sharma, co-founder and CEO of StepSecurity, said in a release.
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StepSecurity says it finds risks, replaces risky actions and defends against security attacks. More than 3,000 projects use StepSecurity's technology, according to the company, including projects from Google, Microsoft and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Sharma spent more than 14 years at Microsoft before co-founding StepSecurity, where he held multiple security engineer roles, according to his LinkedIn page. Ashish Kurmi, the company's co-founder and chief technology officer, brings experience from Plaid, Uber and Microsoft. His LinkedIn page notes he spent almost eight years at Microsoft, where his most recent role was senior software development engineer.
Runtime Ventures led the seed round, while Inner Loop Capital, SaaS Ventures and DeVC participated. Runtime Ventures is focused on early-stage cybersecurity startups.
"Security leaders have learned the hard way that CI/CD security can no longer be ignored, and StepSecurity is at the forefront of this paradigm shift," Michael Sutton, co-founder and general partner at Runtime Ventures, said in a release.
