StackHawk Raises $2.125M Seed Round

USA - English

• USA - English

DENVER, July 23, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- StackHawk, a SaaS company building security software for DevOps teams, today announced venture funding of more than $2 million, led by Boulder-based Foundry Group. The seed round also includes investments from Costanoa Ventures, Palo Alto, CA; Flybridge, Boston, MA, and New York, NY; Matchstick Ventures, Boulder, CO; and industry veterans. StackHawk is focused on enabling engineers to easily find and remediate security problems in development and production through continuous vulnerability scanning, documentation and remediation.

StackHawk's founding team is led by CEO Joni Klippert, along with Scott Gerlach, CSO, and Ryan Severns, COO. The team is strongly positioned with deep experience in both DevOps and security markets, including Klippert bringing with her a decade of experience leading product for developer-focused SaaS applications, and most recently served as vice president of product for VictorOps, from seed stage through its acquisition by Splunk, building a real-time incident management platform for DevOps teams; Gerlach led security as the CISO of SendGrid up through its acquisition by Twilio and was previously head of security for GoDaddy; and Severns served as vice president of growth marketing for JumpCloud and was previously a vice president of marketing and analytics for VictorOps.

Key Takeaways
Developers face two significant challenges: meeting the demands of faster release cycles and achieving appropriate test and security coverage. StackHawk understands the need for efficient and effective security testing to help developers move quickly, while identifying and addressing vulnerabilities at every stage of the software delivery process.

StackHawk will use this round of funding to expand its engineering team and accelerate product development. Current job openings include full-stack engineers, web developers, and UI/UX leadership.

There exists an opportunity to break down the "security silo" and build tooling and processes that make security accessible to and actionable by developers.

Historically, security is introduced late in the product or company lifecycle, as speed to market takes precedence over security posture. This delay causes huge backlogs of vulnerabilities that compete with precious development resources.

StackHawk founders have experienced the need for developer-focused security tooling from a DevOps perspective, and from the CISO seat in a modern development organization. The team is supported in their vision by investors with rich portfolios of developer-first and security companies.

Quotes:
Joni Klippert, CEO, StackHawk
"Security and development teams can have an almost adversarial relationship due to competing priorities. Development teams should be empowered to find and fix the most critical vulnerabilities in the development process, rather than be forced to make tradeoffs between innovation and security down the road."

Scott Gerlach, CSO, StackHawk
"Developers care about writing secure code, but don't have the right tools to find and remediate vulnerabilities themselves. We are going to change that."

Ryan McIntyre, partner, Foundry Group
"We are excited to see StackHawk bring the identification and remediation of security vulnerabilities into the DevOps pipeline. Modern software delivery requires a new security approach and StackHawk is uniquely positioned to address this need."

About StackHawk
StackHawk, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup in Denver, CO, empowers engineers to easily identify and remediate vulnerabilities at any stage of the CI/CD pipeline. Privately held StackHawk is backed by Foundry Group, Costanoa Ventures, Flybridge, and Matchstick Ventures. For more information, visit http://www.stackhawk.com.

SOURCE StackHawk