Snyk hires Erica Geil as CIO after $300m round.
Cloud-native security firm valued at $4.7 billion makes multiple hires.
Snyk -- a security company that helps developers identify and fix vulnerabilities in the open source dependencies often used to build cloud-native applications -- has closed a $300 million Series E round that valued the Boston-based company at $4.7 billion. The company announced a new CIO, Erica Geil, as part of the round.
Erica Geil joins as CIO from Groupon, where she was VP, Global Engineering & Operations and ran a team of 250+ employees with a $50 million OPEX budget. She will "create a united technical and security vision and strategy that will enable Snyk to scale in line with its ambitious expectations", the company said.
The company also added Jeff Yoshimura to its team as CMO, Shaun McLagan as VP for APAC and Japan, and Michael Scarpelli, CFO at Snowflake, and Ping Li, Partner, Accel to its board.
See also: One to watch: Homomorphic encryption specialist Enveil
“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, in a canned release -- which added that a figure of 27 million software developers worldwide is expected to grow by 75% in the upcoming decade.
With a growing number of data breaches directly linked to application vulnerabilities, and software supply chain attacks heavily in the spotlight in the wake of several recent high profile incidents, investors are hot for developer-focussed and cloud-native application-focussed security firms right now. The round comes after Tel Aviv's Aqua Security hit unicorn status with its own more $135 million funding round announced this week.
Snyk's Cloud Native Application Security Platform supports security visibility and remediation for critical components of modern applications, including the application code, open source libraries, container infrastructure and infrastructure as code. The Snyk Intel Vulnerability Database powers technology companies including Atlassian, Datadog, Docker, Dynatrace, Google, Red Hat, Salesforce and Twilio, it said.
Snyk's UK customers include ASOS, Deliveroo and Revolut. 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.
