San Francisco, CA – August 17, 2023 – ProjectDiscovery, the open source powered security company that specializes in the detection of new, exploitable vulnerabilities, today announced that it has raised $25 million in a Series A financing round led by CRV, with participation from Point72 Ventures, SignalFire, Rain Capital, Mango Capital, Accel, Lightspeed, Guillermo Rauch, Caleb Sima and Talha Tariq, among others. At the same time, the company announced the launch of its ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform, a fully-managed SaaS platform built on top of ProjectDiscovery’s most popular open source tools to enable enterprises to discover and remediate vulnerabilities at scale.
Rishiraj Sharma, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ProjectDiscovery, said, “Today’s announcement of our $25 million Series A from visionary venture firm CRV and our existing investors, along with the launch of our ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform, makes us better positioned than ever to advance our mission of democratizing cybersecurity by leveraging the power and speed of our talented and enthusiastic open source community.”
Andy Cao, Chief Operating Officer of ProjectDiscovery, said, “ProjectDiscovery already stands as an extraordinary success story in open-source cybersecurity. Thousands of security experts from all over the world have collaborated with us to build some of the most powerful and modern security tools on the market. Our portfolio of open-source projects has accumulated over 60k GitHub stars with +100k weekly downloads, and we rank as one of the fastest growing open source cybersecurity companies. Nuclei, our core scanning engine, sees over 50 million scans each month from users across 100 different countries. With this additional funding, we are poised to build out a world-class team, launch a market-leading enterprise offering, and continue to support our millions of open-source users. Our success today is a direct result of our loyal community and our growth plans will enable us to give back to our community sustainably for many years to come.”
Reid Christian, General Partner of CRV, said, “With cyberattacks and new vulnerabilities emerging and evolving at an ever-accelerating rate, it’s clear that traditional black-box approaches focused on compliance are ill-equipped to keep pace. With its new cloud platform, ProjectDiscovery has not only introduced a powerful new solution to the threats we’re seeing today – they have created a whole new approach that allows engineers from all over the world to collaborate in real time to diagnose and rapidly remediate security risks as they emerge. ProjectDiscovery perfectly exemplifies the kind of creative, far-sighted innovation that CRV seeks to support, and we’re eager to work with their team to further accelerate the ProjectDiscovery growth story.”
ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform
ProjectDiscovery was born out of a collaboration between four cybersecurity engineers who saw a glaring need for modern security tools that could automate asset discovery and vulnerability scanning to continually detect new elements in an organization’s evolving attack surface. In conjunction with a passionate open-source community, they developed a suite of open source solutions including ProjectDiscovery’s original Nuclei vulnerability scanner to enable anyone to discover trending and exploitable vulnerabilities across web applications, APIs, cloud environments and third-party applications.
ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform represents the company’s first commercial offering to bring all of ProjectDiscovery’s most popular open source tools to the enterprise in an easy-to-use, hosted platform. The new platform allows enterprises to manage assets, discover, and remediate vulnerabilities at scale, and fix cloud security misconfigurations.
The new platform includes features designed to:
- Streamline enterprises’ ability to run ProjectDiscovery tools at scale;
- Further enhance the efficiency of ProjectDiscovery’s modular open-source tools through automated connection functionality; and
- Provide enterprise requirements such as a robust UI, integrations, reporting and support for all security requirements.
Over 3,000 organizations and engineers registered for the ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform beta, reflecting the powerful engagement that has given ProjectDiscovery one of the fastest growing open-source communities in the cybersecurity industry.
Dr. Chenxi Wang, seed investor in ProjectDiscovery and Managing General Partner at Rain Capital, said, “The open source approach has created successful companies in DevOps and many other areas, but successes in the cybersecurity space have been few and far between. With the open source know-how, an active, fast-growing community, and an innovative approach to vulnerability management, ProjectDiscovery is in a unique position to bring open source innovation to the enterprise. As a long-time investor in ProjectDiscovery, we’re more excited than ever to help this company scale and lead the vulnerability-management-as-code movement.”
About ProjectDiscovery
ProjectDiscovery is a globally distributed startup on a mission to democratize cyber security. We are an open source-powered security company specializing in preemptive identification of new, exploitable vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. Our cloud platform integrates asset management, vulnerability detection, and cloud security tooling with unique remediation capabilities to provide an end-to-end solution that continuously secures enterprises’ external perimeters and prioritizes protection against attackers over auditors.
About CRV
CRV is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage tech startups. Since 1970, the firm has invested in more than 500 startups at their most crucial stages, including Airtable, DoorDash and Vercel. Founders need more than capital to build a great company. It takes a partner who understands the entrepreneurial journey and knows what it takes to win. From founding to IPO and beyond, CRV is there every step of the way. Founders rely on CRV to be trusted, long-term, committed partners, which has helped make CRV into one of the longest-running venture capital firms in the world. Learn more about CRV and the companies shaping the future at https://www.crv.com.
