StackHawk raises $20.7M for dynamic app testing platform

Today, application security testing provider StackHawk announced it has raised $20.7 million as part of a Series B funding round led by Sapphire Ventures and Costanoa Ventures.

StackHawk’s dynamic application and API security testing platform has the potential to inform developers to continuously test code and identify quality issues based on failed unit tests or integration tests.

Part of the reason behind the investor interest in StackHawk is that it provides enterprises with a solution to efficiently mitigate application security vulnerabilities so that developers don’t have to manually identify issues when deployed on a daily or hourly basis.

Keeping up with the demands of the software development lifecycle

The funding comes as more and more developers struggle to meet software development lifecycle demands, which are expected to release new releases constantly, with minimal time to mitigate security or performance issues.

For these organizations, application security testing solutions such as Stackhawk provide a solution to proactively identify and resolve issues and ensure developers can be confident that the code they submit is secure.

†Forrester reports that application and API security exploits are the most common form of external cyber-attacks affecting organizations today. This is because the way organizations find and solve application and API security vulnerabilities has not evolved with the way software is delivered,” said Joni Klippert, founder and CEO of StackHawk.

“Technical teams are making software changes on a daily basis. But security testing has been left in silos, with security teams testing for vulnerabilities quarterly or annually, using manual testing methods. This decoupling is what leaves organizations’ apps and APIs unprotected,” says Klippert.

StackHawk’s solution to this predicament is simple; Provide developers with automated testing capabilities and notifications so they can quickly code and resolve coding issues when identified by the solution.

The Application Security Market

Organizational growth occurs as the application security market: is expected to grow from a value of $6.38 billion in 2020 to a total value of $15.76 billion by 2026 as enterprises seek new solutions to secure the applications and code they rely on.

The organization competes with a range of other Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) providers, including: Vera codea nine-time leader in the Gartner Magic quadrant for application security testing, providing an application security solution with a combination of SAST, DAST, SCA and automated application analytics capabilities.

Veracode recently announced that it has increased revenue by 13 percent since last year.

Another competitor is WhiteHat Securityan application security platform with dynamic testing powered by AI and machine learning, with continuous vulnerability scanning, reporting and analysis, which the researchers say has generated total funding of more than $50 million crunch base†

However, Klippert says StackHawk is the only solution on the market built for DevSecOps and CI/CD workloads. “What really sets Stackhawk apart from older DAST vendors is the ability to run security testing in CI/CD.”