Bugcrowd raises $15m in Series B funding round

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news Australia-founded Bugcrowd, a provider of crowdsourced security for enterprises, has announced the completion of a $15 million Series B funding round led by Blackbird Ventures.

Current investors Rally Ventures, Costanoa Venture Capital and Paladin Capital Group also participated in the round, along with newcomers Industry Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

The latest investment will be used to accelerate customer and crowd growth, pursue new partnerships, and boost engineering and R&D efforts, the firm said.

“We’re incredibly proud to become a more substantial partner to one of the great Australian-born startups to emerge in the last decade,” said Niki Scevak, co-founder and Managing Director of Blackbird Ventures. “Casey and the team are fundamentally changing the way the good guys can fight the bad guys in an online battle that is becoming increasingly important in our digital age.”

The company’s flagship product, Crowdcontrol, is used by major brands including Fitbit, Motorola, Tesla, TripAdvisor, Western Union, thanks to its novel crowdsourced approach to website security.

Crowdcontrol enables customers to proactively discover and resolve security bugs in their products via its “curated, vetted” community of over 27,000 security researchers, according to Bugcrowd.

To date, Bugcrowd has raised a total of $24 million in investment and is riding the wave of global market demand for trusted ‘bug bounty’ programs.

Since getting started at the Startmate accelerator in Sydney, Bugcrowd said it has experienced over 200% bookings growth year-on-year, with 10 consecutive quarters of revenue growth.

“The importance of harnessing the power and ingenuity of the global research community – as well as the adoption of this concept amongst large enterprises – has grown massively since Bugcrowd’s inception in 2012 and will only continue to accelerate,” said Art Coviello, former Executive Chairman of RSA and board member at Bugcrowd.

“Bugcrowd’s early success, agility and level of trust across the mainstream market validate its radical security advantage, as the best security assessment solution on the market,” Coviello added.

Sasha Biskup, Fitbit’s Director of Information Security, commented: “Bugcrowd complements our internal security assurance and testing capability with their large pool of researchers, providing added security coverage of our key Internet assets. Bugcrowd also helped us streamline the process of setting up a responsible disclosure program that gives our customers confidence that Fitbit is doing everything in its power to protect their private information.”

Bugcrowd provides its customers with a “radical cybersecurity advantage” over their adversaries, according to Casey Ellis, CEO and founder of Bugcrowd.

“Hackers and companies desperately need each other but are historically terrible at getting along, and our success positions us ahead of the incredible opportunity to change that,” he said.

“We are looking forward to what the future holds here at Bugcrowd, and are incredibly proud to take a scrappy, innovative startup – born in the blossoming Australian startup scene and brought to Silicon Valley – to even greater heights in 2016,” Casey concluded.