Pentesting and bug bounty platform provider HackerOne on Monday announced that it raised $36.4 million in a Series D funding round, which brings the total raised by the company to date to more than $110 million.
The latest funding round was led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, Dragoneer Investment Group and EQT Ventures. HackerOne plans on using the money to scale enterprise and data-powered offerings, expand its global market reach, and further strengthen its hacker community.
HackerOne says its platform is used by over 1,500 customers, with more than 500,000 hackers trying to find vulnerabilities in their products. Customers include Avionics, Alibaba, the U.S. Department of Defense, Dropbox, the European Commission, Google, Intel, GitHub, PayPal, Qualcomm, Slack, Sumo Logic, Twitter and Verizon Media.
The company says six white hats have earned over $1 million through its platform and hackers from 19 countries received more than $100,000 last year. HackerOne claims its customers have paid out over $65 million in bug bounties for more than 130,000 vulnerabilities.
HackerOne received $9 million in its Series A round back in 2014. Jobert Abma, co-founder of HackerOne, has now explained why the company decided to approach investors in San Francisco at the time.
“We initially chose to take our business to San Francisco because we knew we had a better chance of securing ambitious funding there. Europe is a far more cautious place when it comes to investment but we always knew we that leveraging hacker powered security was the answer to making the internet a safer place, and we needed capital to help us achieve this. Investors in Amsterdam saw our potential but were only prepared to invest $2.5 million in what was such a new concept at the time,” Abma said.
“By making the move to San Francisco, we ultimately raised $9 million in our first funding round. There was also a much bigger market for hacker powered security in the US, but we’ve seen far more European companies discover the benefits of working with the hacking community, with a 32 per cent increase in the uptake of HackerOne programs in Europe over the last year.
“We’ve come so far since that first round – we love that we have been able to return to Europe, having recently opened offices in London and Paris in addition to our engineering office in Groningen. This additional funding means we can continue to invest in the region, grow our local teams and even further expand our community of hackers that work so hard to protect customers,” he added.
HackerOne has pointed out that companies in San Francisco raised $27.5 billion in funding last year, compared to companies in London, Berlin and Amsterdam, which attracted only $2.3 billion, $1.2 billion and $200 million, respectively.
Related: HackerOne Penetrates VC Pockets for $40 Million
Related: HackerOne Lands $25 Million to Grow Bug Hunting Business
Related: HackerOne Secures $9 Million, Appoints Katie Moussouris Chief Policy Officer
