Today (Wednesday), Israeli startup Snyk, a developer of cloud-native application security, closed a $300 million Series E financing round, which was done based on a $4.7 billion valuation. The investment was led by Accel and Tiger Global Management, with participation from existing investors: Addition, Boldstart Ventures, Canaan Partners, Coatue, GV (formally Google Ventures), Salesforce Ventures, Stripes and funds managed by BlackRock; new investors include Alkeon, Atlassian Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Geodesic Capital, Sands Capital Ventures and Temasek.
Close to $125 million of the raised funds will be used to reward employees, the founding team, and stakeholders, while the remaining $175 million will be added to the company’s piggy bank. Just six months ago, Snyk scored $200 million in funding and doubled its billion-dollar valuation, which was set a few months earlier during yet another 9 digit funding round.
Value quadrupled year-over-year
In the past, most uses of open source code happened in 5 components like Apache. Today, however, various marketplaces offer developers more than 200,000 open source options. Snyk allows developers to test code before committing. The platform scans the code and alerts to any weaknesses, leading to critical vulnerabilities. If any problems are detected in the code, the Snyk system immediately implements the relevant security update to fix the glitch. In order to detect the vulnerabilities, the company uses available databases and its own scans, which flag problematic code around the web. As of today, over 300,000 developers use the platform, and according to the company, it supports over 200 customers, including Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and ASOS.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Snyk CEO Peter McKay said that he believes the company will go public within the next two years. McKay also added that he doesn’t see the company taking the SPAC route, but rather looking towards a traditional IPO.
"Our relentless focus on the experience of the 2.2 million developers building applications of all kinds securely with Snyk has resulted in our success to date, and we believe there is an exponential, generational opportunity still in front of us," said McKay. "This latest investment allows us to accelerate our growth at every level - doubling down on our successful product led growth strategy, adding to our customer roster, recruiting talent to our team worldwide and expanding geographically."
