SourceClear Raises $1.5M in Seed Funding from Investors, Including Frank Marshall and Box.com Chief Trust Officer
SourceClear, a Seattle, Washington-based startup that is creating a software security platform for developers, announced on Tuesday that it has closed $1.5 million in seed funding that the company will use to support the launch of its SourceClear platform.
According to the company, its SourceClear platform is expected to be available in the coming weeks, and helps organizations identify which components they are using across their software portfolio, where they come from, what they do and which ones have security issues.
The platform integrates directly into development tools, features machine-learning capabilities and leverages big data analytics to help developers fix issues and stay protected against new threats.
SourceClear’s Founder and CEO Mark Curphey founded OWASP, headed the software security program at Charles Schwab, led the information security tools team at Microsoft and was the Product Unit Manager for the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).
“Developers are literally the only people who can solve the epidemic in software security,” said Curphey. “Traditional security tools were built for security and IT people, and there has been poor adoption and high degrees of friction from developers. With the cloud, agile, open-source, mobile, devops, big-data, artificial intelligence and social platforms, developers are changing the world faster than ever before and security tools simply haven’t kept up. We are changing that. Developers love us, and our early funding is a strong vote of confidence in our vision.”
“Up to 80% of the source code in modern applications originates from reusable and open-source development frameworks and libraries,” the company explained. “Hackers have learned to analyze and exploit these components giving them access to far more data than hacking systems one-by-one. Hackers and governments are known to have modified open-source libraries which are then innocently installed by developers creating backdoors and vulnerabilities that can be exploited at will.”
SourceClear’s seed round, which the company said was over-subscribed, was led by a group of angel investors including Justin Somaini, Chief Trust Officer at Box.com; Frank J. Marshall, former VP of Engineering at Cisco Systems Inc.; Amos Michelson, Chairman of Kardium; and Mary Cirillo, board member at Thomson Reuters (TRI).
The company’s advisory board includes Somaini, privacy expert and author Siobhan MacDermott, CrowdStrike CEO and former McAfee global CTO George Kurtz, software security expert John Viega and user experience expert Charlie Claxton.
