Snyk raises $150 million at $1 billion valuation for AI that protects open source code Posted on : Jan 21 - 2020

Snyk, a cybersecurity platform that helps developers find vulnerabilities in their open source applications, has raised $150 million in a round of funding led by New York-based private equity firm Stripes, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Coatue, Tiger Global, BoldStart, Trend Forward, and Amity.

This takes Snyk’s total funding to $250 million from backers including Alphabet’s GV and Accel, including a $22 million series B round in 2018 and a $70 million follow-on round just a few months ago. A Snyk spokesperson said that the company is now worth more than $1 billion, which is at least double the $500 million it was valued at back in September.

Founded in 2015, London-based Snyk targets developers — rather than cybersecurity personnel — to help them find and fix flaws in their source code, as well as their containers and Kubernetes applications.

The developer connects Snyk to a code repository in the likes of GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, and Snyk then scans for vulnerabilities (or license violations), providing a description of the problem, noting where the flaw lies in the code, issuing a severity rating, and even suggesting a fix. Underpinning this is a giant vulnerability database maintained by a security team in Israel and London.

It’s worth noting that Snyk monitors source code before, during, and after an app ships. “During development, Snyk prevents vulnerabilities from reaching production and helps to fix those that were missed,” Snyk cofounder and president Guy Podjarny told VentureBeat. “Snyk continuously monitors the applications and alerts when a newly disclosed vulnerability could impact the customer.”

Automation for the people

AI, machine learning (ML), and automation are playing an increasingly big role in the cybersecurity sphere — just last year BlackBerry doled out $1.4 billion to acquire AI-powered security platform Cylance, while Crowdstrike hit the public markets and now claims a market capitalization of more than $12 billion. Shape Security also recently entered the much-coveted unicorn fraternity with a $1 billion-plus valuation as it prepares its own IPO.

And it’s against that backdrop that Snyk is looking to carve its niche, with a focus on using AI and and ML to help developer teams directly. The company’s data science concentrates on two key areas: vulnerability intelligence and developer insights. For the latter, Snyk’s platform observes how its users use container and application dependencies — for example, when do they roll back and when do they upgrade — and use those insights to improve its automated fixes. For vulnerability intelligence it’s a similar idea, insofar as it’s all about monitoring what is happening and garnering lessons from developers’ activities. View More