Cobalt – the cybersecurity platform that connects human penetration testers (sometimes known as ‘ethical hackers’) with companies looking to test the robustness of their software – has raised $29 million from investors to continue its global expansion, bringing its total funding level to $37 million. The Series B round was led by growth-stage experts Highland Europe, the global venture capital firm whose portfolio includes Malwarebytes, Nexthink, Adjust, ContentSquare and WeTransfer. Gajan Rajanathan joins the board from Highland.
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The new funding will go towards expanding global usage and continuing development of the Cobalt platform, which pioneered the Penetration test as a Service (PtaaS) model. The breakneck pace of technology innovation has triggered increased demand for sophisticated human cybersecurity experts, who work to find vulnerabilities in software – a process known as ‘penetration testing’ or ‘pentesting’. While automated cybersecurity screening is important, systematic security checks require human ingenuity and rigorous compliance reviews.
Cobalt was founded in 2013 by four Danish co-founders – Jacob Hansen, Esben Friis-Jensen, Jakob Storm and Christian Hansen, all self-identified outsiders to the security world. The team struggled for traction with early-stage investors for its original ‘bug bounty’ business model, in which testers were paid based on the vulnerabilities they found. This forced a rethink, leading the team to innovate its product as well as execute with impressive capital efficiency.
Cobalt now has more than 500 clients, including GoDaddy, Vonage, Axel Springer and MuleSoft, and around 300 pentesters on its platform. Customers are globally distributed, with the US as Cobalt’s largest market. The company’s growth has accelerated in the first half of 2020, in spite of the global pandemic, with the company operating at breakeven. Over the past four years, Cobalt has conducted thousands of pentests; its annual testing figures are doubling year on year, and its rate of growth is increasing. As technology buying decisions become more agile and remote-first, Cobalt’s security certification process enables software and internet companies to navigate release cycles faster while ensuring trust and efficiency in the procurement process.
“Organizations do business globally and digitally, yet traditional pentesting is delivered locally via a PDF,” said Jacob Hansen, co-founder and CEO of Cobalt. “The pentesting industry doesn’t need another cool tool, it needs people and process innovation. That is why we created a way to engage the best cybersecurity talent, via our pentest management platform, allowing customers to move from a static pentest to platform-driven pentest programs. Cobalt ultimately drives better security and improves return on investment for each customer.”
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