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HackerOne: a platform for hackers and their clients
The American company HackerOne received an investment of $49 million. It is known for creating a platform where hackers reveal vulnerabilities in the cybersecurity systems of business companies, and the latter pays for the services provided.
The main investor in the round was GP Bullhound, and Valor Equity Partners, Benchmark and others also took part in the financing.
Representatives of HackerOne did not disclose the value of the company after raising new funds, but it became known that the investments will be used to improve the functionality. In addition, the developer plans to enter new markets and attract more customers to its platform. According to Crunchbase, HackerOne has raised $110 million since 2012, not including the amount from the current round.
The HackerOne service allows “white hat hackers” to find security flaws in partner companies. Then the information about the vulnerabilities is sent to the client and the hacker gets paid for the work done.
According to HackerOne, 17 thousand security loopholes were found on the platform last year, and approximately 2,000 of them were related to Log4Shell. The company now serves more than 100 customers, including such giants as Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, and Twitter. In addition, HackerOne works with the U.S. Department of Defense. In 2016, hackers on the platform tested the Pentagon’s system. The hackers identified 138 vulnerabilities. The Department paid more than 71 thousand dollars for the work done.
HackerOne is headquartered in San Francisco and has a representative office in Groningen, the Netherlands. This is where almost all the developments are carried out.
The company was the first of its kind, which channeled the skills of hackers into a legitimate way. The startup was founded in 2011 by three specialists who were searching for threats in the security systems of major technology companies. They managed to identify vulnerabilities in corporations such as Apple, Facebook, and Google – a total of 100 IT giants. After that, the programmers met with a Facebook representative who was responsible for product security, and together they founded HackerOne in 2012. A year later, a bug detection platform was created, and in 2014 a Series A funding round raised $9 million to develop the project. Benchmark was the investor. Another year later, $25 million in funding was received from a number of other investors.
The platform from HackerOne allows for secure analysis of a client’s cybersecurity system and payment to hackers for services provided. Already by 2015, hackers had received more than $3 million for identified threats. In total, the platform employs more than 1,500 such specialists from 150 countries.