![casey-ellis]()
Yesterday afternoon, crowdsourced security testing startup
Bugcrowd announced in a blog post that it had closed a $6 million Series A round of funding. This brings the total amount of funds raised to date to $9 million since the company was founded in 2012.
The round was led by Costanoa Venture Capital with Rally Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Australia's Blackbird Ventures also participating.
Bugcrowd has announced that it will be using the funds to expand its operations staff such as sales and marketing personnel and its world class team of security researchers. The funding will also help the startup further accelerate its growth and match the high demand for its services. Right now the Bugcrowd platform claims to have 15,300 security professionals that have been fully vetted and bring a wide gamut of expertise and knowledge to the platform's 'crowd'.
The company which was part of Australia's Startmate program when it began, has been working hard over the last couple of years to bridge the gap between skilled security researchers and clients that need security testing. Bugcrowd boasts a strong customer acquisition rate counting some of the world's largest brands as customers including Microsoft, Google and Facebook who have been integral to the success of the 'Bug Bounty' program that runs on the startup's site.
In the aforementioned blog post Bugcrowd mentioned that some of its most notable pre-Series A successes includes:
- 11.3x revenue growth rate year over year from 2013 to 2014
- Bugcrowd has seen swift and strong customer acquisition and currently has run over 160 programs to date.
- Some well known customers include: Western Union, Pinterest, Barracuda Networks, Silent Circle (Blackphone), Indeed and more.
- Significant growth of security researcher “Crowd” from 3,000 in September 2013 to more than 15,000 to date.
- Key additions to the Bugcrowd team include security industry veterans such as Kymberlee Price and Jeremiah Grossman who will be joining us as an advisor.
Bugcrowd was founded by Casey Ellis and Chris Raethke and was originally based in Australia until 2013 when it set up base in San Francisco to take advantage of the market over there. It still counts many Australian companies as customers though, having run 'Bounty' campaigns for Google locally and other tech companies based here like BigCommerce, Coles and POLi Payments.
