Snyk, the leader in cloud native application security, today announced that the company has closed a Series E financing, totaling $300 million. The transaction included both primary and secondary offerings and resulted in $175 million of new capital into the business. The company has now raised a total of $470 million to date with a valuation of $4.7 billion post this round, quadrupling since the beginning of 2020.
The round was co-led by Accel and Tiger Global, 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.
This investment allows Snyk to serve the fast growing global demand for the company’s Cloud Native Application Security Platform which is the only developer-first solution to provide security visibility and remediation for every critical component of modern applications, including the application code, open source libraries, container infrastructure and infrastructure as code.
The company additionally announced the hiring of Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer Jeff Yoshimura, CIO Erica Geil, Vice President, Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) Sales, Shaun McLagan, and the appointment of two new Board Members, Michael Scarpelli, Chief Financial Officer, Snowflake, and Ping Li, Partner, Accel.
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“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 Peter McKay, CEO, Snyk. “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.”
Security in Transformation
With 43% of data breaches today directly linked to application vulnerabilities1, organizations across the board have realized a new approach to security is urgently needed. Since its founding in 2015, transforming the legacy industry has been Snyk’s guiding vision, empowering developers to build security into the development process early rather than waiting to hand it over to a separate security team when development is done.
At the same time, digital transformation, along with the cloud, has injected even more urgency into this movement. Software releases that used to occur a few times a year have now exploded to multiple times a day. Every company already embracing DevOps must quickly evolve to DevSecOps, transforming security to embrace a developer first mentality and securing the entire cloud native stack. The Snyk Cloud Native Application Security Platform enables modern developers to build securely without sacrificing the speed their business requires in order to successfully compete.
As a result, Snyk has been at the forefront of the transformation of the developer’s traditional role as they have taken on greater authority and autonomy for security and the function has rapidly shifted left. To be successful, developers require real-time answers, automated remediation and the integration of security within their workflows, while security teams need more collaboration with developers to enable security and governance at scale across all of the organization’s applications, infrastructure and cloud services.
“We first met the Snyk team at the start of their journey, as early investors,” said Ping Li, Partner, Accel. “Throughout our partnership, we’ve witnessed first-hand Snyk’s unshakeable dedication to developer and security teams and their original vision become a reality. We’re looking forward to supporting the successes of Snyk in 2021 and beyond.”
Reaching More Developers In More Places
With an estimated 27 million software developers worldwide today, this number is expected to grow by 75% in the upcoming decade2. Snyk has long invested in advancing other developer-first companies to embed security into its diverse developer tooling ecosystem, ultimately introducing them to a new way of working that brings about greater security measures without greater friction or frustration.
The Snyk Intel Vulnerability Database powers innovative, developer-centric technology companies including Atlassian, Datadog, Docker, Dynatrace, Google, Red Hat, Salesforce and Twilio. Snyk is privileged to have members of this ecosystem directly participate in this latest financing round.
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“We believe Snyk’s developer-first approach to security is a fantastic tool for developers and organizations today,” said Chris Hecht, Head of Corporate Development, Atlassian. “Snyk has already showcased some amazing integrations with our tools, and we’re now thrilled to extend our partnership with them through an Atlassian Ventures investment.”
“Salesforce Ventures was an early investor in Snyk and we’re excited to grow our partnership even further, particularly as Snyk is deployed across various development teams at Salesforce,” said Alex Kayyal, Partner, Salesforce Ventures International. “As transformation accelerates in this digital-first world, Snyk’s vision to enable companies to embrace security earlier in the development cycle continues to resonate deeply.”
Expanding Leadership Team
To help Snyk execute on its next phase of growth, Snyk has bolstered its leadership team with the addition of Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer, Jeff Yoshimura, Chief Information Officer, Erica Geil and Vice President, APJ Sales, Shaun McLagan.
Yoshimura brings 25 years of experience leading teams at Elastic (NYSE), Zuora (NYSE) and Salesforce (NYSE). Most recently, Yoshimura spent six years with Elastic, helping build the company from its early days to an IPO and leading a 150-person global marketing team. With Snyk’s focus on product-led growth, Yoshimura will lead the community, marketing, customer success and services teams to ensure a fully integrated, customer-centric experience.
Geil joins from Groupon (NYSE) where she spent more than ten years in engineering, IT and operations roles, most recently serving as Vice President of Global Engineering and Operations. In her new role, Geil plans to create a united technical and security vision and strategy that will enable Snyk to scale in line with its ambitious expectations.
McLagan will spearhead Snyk’s expansion and growth in APJ and build out Snyk’s go-to-market teams in Australia, India, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore. Based in Singapore, McLagan brings more than 25 years of security and APJ leadership experience having previously worked at Dell EMC, RSA and Veeam Software.
New Board Members
Snyk is also welcoming two new members, Michael Scarpelli and Ping Li, to its Board of Directors.
Scarpelli currently serves as the Chief Financial Officer at Snowflake, previously serving as CFO at ServiceNow from 2011 to 2019. His experience at innovative high-growth public companies will be invaluable to Snyk during its next phase of growth.
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Li has been with Accel since 2004, developing an investment focus on cloud native technology platforms. He’s been responsible for numerous past investments with notable exits, including Cloudera (NYSE), Demisto (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Heptio (acquired by VMware), Sumo Logic (NASDAQ) and Tenable (NASDAQ).
