Cybersecurity Firm Snyk Secures $300M Series E Funding

Boston-based cybersecurity startup Snyk has raised $300 million in Series E funding, valuing the company at $4.7 billion. The round was led by Accel with participation from Tiger Global and existing investors including Stripes, Salesforce Ventures, and GV.

Snyk provides developer-first security tools that help companies find and fix vulnerabilities in open source dependencies, container images, and infrastructure as code. The platform integrates directly into developers workflows, allowing them to identify and remediate security issues early in the development process.

Security has traditionally been a bottleneck in software development, with security teams reviewing code after it is written, said Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk. We are changing that by empowering developers to find and fix security issues as they code, making security a natural part of the development process.

The company has experienced explosive growth, with annual recurring revenue growing more than 200 percent year-over-year. Snyk now serves over 2,000 enterprise customers, including Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft, as well as hundreds of thousands of individual developers.

The new funding will be used to expand Snyk product portfolio, particularly in cloud security and application security. The company plans to launch new capabilities for securing cloud-native applications and Kubernetes environments, areas of growing concern for enterprises.

Snyk will also invest heavily in its developer community. The company maintains one of the largest open source vulnerability databases in the world, with information on millions of known vulnerabilities. This database is freely available to developers and is continuously updated by Snyk security research team.

Developer security is one of the fastest-growing segments in cybersecurity, said Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel. Snyk has established itself as the clear leader in this space, and we are excited to support their continued growth.

The funding comes at a time of increasing concern about software supply chain security. High-profile attacks like the SolarWinds breach have highlighted the risks of vulnerabilities in open source dependencies and third-party software.

Snyk approach addresses these concerns by scanning code for vulnerabilities continuously, not just at deployment. The platform can identify vulnerable dependencies, suggest fixes, and even automatically create pull requests to update vulnerable packages.

The company has also been expanding internationally, with significant growth in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Snyk now has offices in London, Tel Aviv, Ottawa, and Singapore, in addition to its Boston headquarters.

Looking ahead, Snyk plans to continue investing in research and development, with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company is exploring how AI can be used to automatically detect and fix security vulnerabilities, potentially reducing the burden on developers even further.