The famous Bug bounty provider HackerOne has announced on Wednesday that they have raised $40 million in a Serious C financing round that is led by the Dragoneer Investment Group.
This San Francisco-based startup offers a software-as-a-service(SaaS) platform which provides the technology and automation to help organisations to run their own bug bounty and vulnerability management programs.
The company says that the new funds will be invested in technology development, expanding market reach, and also strengthen their hacker community which has more than 100,000 white hat hackers
The company was co-founded by Alex Rice who is the company’s CTO and also the man behind Facebook’s bug bounty program, Merijn Terheggen, the man who serves as CEO, Jobert Abma (the tech lead) and Michiel Prins (the product lead). HackerOne has gained publicity back in November 2013 when they have announced hosting the Internet Bug Bounty project which is funded by Facebook and Microsoft.
According to this security startup, greater than 38,000 security vulnerabilities are resolved across greater than 700 HackerOne customers, with makes more than $14 million in bug bounties awarded as of now, $7 million of this was awarded only in 2016.
In 2016, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected HackerOne to run the U.S. federal government’s first bug bounty challenge, Hack the Pentagon, which HackerOne says resolved more than 138 vulnerabilities discovered by 1,400 hackers.
In October 2016 the DoD announced that it awarded a combined $7 million to HackerOne and Synack for helping the organisation’s components launch their own bug bounty initiatives. With $3 million awarded to HackerOne, the company will help the DoD run challenges similar to Hack the Pentagon, while Synack will provide assistance for a private program open only to highly vetted researchers, the DoD said, adding that the private program will focus on the Pentagon’s sensitive IT assets.
Other HackerOne customers include CloudFlare, Airbnb, GitHub, New Relic, General Motors, Qualcomm, Starbucks, Nintendo, Uber and Lufthansa.