Bugcrowd Gets More than $100 Million in Strategic Growth Financing

Bugcrowd partners will benefit from $102 million in strategic growth financing the company has received to scale its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered crowdsourced security platform offerings globally.

That’s according to Dave Gerry, Bugcrowd’s CEO. General Catalyst led the growth financing round with participation from longtime existing investors Rally Ventures and Costanoa Ventures.

Bugcrowd said this funding round underscores investor confidence in its leadership position in the crowdsourced security market. The additional capital allows Bugcrowd to accelerate growth across EMEA, APAC and the United States, fund continued innovation into the Bugcrowd platform, and leverage opportunities for strategic M&A, providing added value to clients, partners and the hacker community.

Bugcrowd's Dave Gerry

“In partnering with Bugcrowd, our partners are positioning themselves with the leader in crowdsourced security testing, enabling them to help their clients disrupt the cyber adversaries they face,” Gerry said. “With the recent release of the Bugcrowd CrowdConnect Program, partners have never been better positioned with Bugcrowd to drive meaningful margins, growth and customer value. Our goal is to achieve over 40% of our growth through the channel with the ultimate goal being a partner-first go-to-market (GTM) model in the future. Partners are critical to our continued success and we will continue to ensure we have the solutions, programs and team in place to support them.”

Big Things to Come from Growth Financing

Over the past 12 months, Bugcrowd has added more than 200 clients to its roster, including OpenAI, T-Mobile, Rapyd and ExpressVPN, bringing the total number of clients to nearly 1,000. The company has also added over 100 new people to its staff, grown the overall business more than 40% and its pentest-as-a-service (PTaaS) business nearly 100% year-over-year.

“Our sights are set even higher in 2024 with upcoming planned product launches and we’re excited to sell together with our partners,” Gerry said. “... And we remain committed to making our clients, our partners and the hacker community wildly successful. By partnering with Bugcrowd, our partners are able to drive unparalleled customer value as we enter a new era of cybersecurity.” 

In 2023 alone, customers found almost 23,000 high-impact vulnerabilities using the Bugcrowd platform, helping to prevent potential breach-related costs of up to $100 billion.

As a part of this investment, Mark Crane, partner at General Catalyst, and Paul Sagan, senior advisor at General Catalyst, will join Bugcrowd's board of directors. Sagan will also step into the board chair role. Jeff Simon, chief security officer at T-Mobile, and Prabhath Karanth, vice president and global head of security and trust at Navan, join the advisory board to serve alongside David Fairman, CIO and CSO of APAC at Netskope. 

“We saw an opportunity to make a strategic investment in the crowdsourced security market, with the goal of fostering collaboration between customers and hackers to collectively tackle real threats and vulnerabilities,” Crane said. "In our view, the validation from customers, hackers, industry analysts and the broader cybersecurity community well positions Bugcrowd to be a category-leading company. We look forward to partnering with Dave and team in setting new standards in crowdsourced security.”