HackerOne Lands $25 Million to Grow Bug Hunting Business

Bug bounty platform provider HackerOne announced on Wednesday that it has raised $25 million in a Series B financing round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

The San Francisco-based startup offers a software-as-a-service platform that provides the technology and automation to help organizations run their own vulnerability management and bug bounty programs.

“Powered by hackers,” the company explains that its platform helps customers discover security vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis, allowing them to fix issues before bad guys are able to exploit them.

The company was co-founded by Alex Rice, the company’s CTO and the man behind Facebook’s bug bounty program, Merijn Terheggen, who serves as CEO, Jobert Abma (tech lead) and Michiel Prins (product lead). HackerOne gained publicity in November 2013 when it announced hosting the Internet Bug Bounty project funded by Microsoft and Facebook.

“Fulfilling the promise of a safer Internet requires a fundamentally new approach to vulnerability management,” said Merijn Terheggen, co-founder and CEO, HackerOne. “Identifying and fixing software security holes at scale truly takes an army. HackerOne’s early success has been driven entirely by word-of-mouth, proving that our model really works. With this new funding we will be one step closer to our mission of enabling any company to run a world-class vulnerability management program.”

The startup claims that it has helped customers find nearly 10,000 security vulnerabilities, and has paid more than $3.19 million in bug bounties to more than 1,500 independent security researchers to date.

More than 250 customers use HackerOne, including Yahoo!, Slack, Square, Twitter, Dropbox, Adobe, and many more.

The company competes with other firms in the bug discovery space, including Bugcrowd and Synack.

News of the funding comes just about a year after the company announced that it had landed $9 million in a Series A round of funding in May 2014, and appointed Katie Moussouris, former senior security strategist lead at Microsoft, as the company’s chief policy officer.

The Series B round includes participation from existing investors, including Benchmark, as well as angel investors including Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, Digital Sky Technologies Founder Yuri Milner, Dropbox CEO and Co-Founder Drew Houston, Yelp CEO and Co-Founder Jeremy Stoppelman, Zenefits COO David Sacks, Riot Games CEO and Co-Founder Brandon Beck, and Berggruen Holdings Chairman Nicolas Berggruen, among others.

Jon Sakoda, general partner at NEA, has also joined HackerOne’s board of directors.

*Updated to add Abma and Prins as co-founders of HackerOne.