San Francisco-based penetration testing as a service company, Cobalt.io, has raised $5 million in Series A funding, bringing total disclosed investment in the company to date to $6.5 million.
Cobalt, which helps secure applications for companies including Credit Karma, GoDaddy, MuleSoft and Verifone, draws on a pool of global certified freelancers to provide pentesting and vulnerability assessment services. It says that it will be using the funding to continue its global expansion and invest further in its PTaaS platform.
Cobalt is a great example of the type of excellent Nordic founders with global ambitions that we like to invest in
– Eric Lagier, Managing Partner, byFounders
According to CEO and co-founder Jacob Hansen, the company tripled in growth in 2017, with the platform being adopted by almost 100 new clients over the year. As a result, Cobalt is branching out into the European market, and earlier this year opened a Sales, Customer Success and Engineering office in Berlin.
Backers included byFounders, elab Ventures, DG Incubation, Plug and Play Ventures and Draper Associates. Eric Lagier, Managing Partner at byFounders (which is a new investor in Cobalt) joined the Cobalt board, as has Michele Law, who recently served as Chief Revenue Officer of Castlight Health, before which she was COO of OpenDNS. Bob Stefanski, MD of eLab Ventures, was already on the board, alongside application security expert Caleb Sima and CEO Jacob Hansen.
“Cobalt’s current growth and execution track record is impressive, so we were eager to help fuel their continued global growth,” said Lagier. “byFounders is backed by some of the most accomplished founders in the Nordics and Baltics and Cobalt is a great example of the type of excellent Nordic founders with global ambitions that we like to invest in.”
Rob Mann, who leads security assurance at Google, has also joined Cobalt as an investor and advisor. He said: “I’ve spent many years working on scaling assessments and pen testing while maintaining quality of the testing. I’m excited about Cobalt’s approach and how they combine their platform, methodology and global talent pool to disrupt the traditional pen testing and assessment model.”
