Cybersecurity platform that connects human penetration testers with companies looking to test the robustness of their software, Cobalt has raised $29 million in the Series B round. Cobalt’s funding round was led by growth-stage experts Highland Europe, the global venture capital firm whose portfolio includes Malwarebytes, Nexthink, Adjust, ContentSquare, and WeTransfer. As a result of the funding round, Gajan Rajanathan joins the board from Highland.
Penetration test as a Service
The company also stated that the funding will be spent on expanding global usage and continuing development of the platform. Cobalt’s, pioneer of the Penetration test as a Service (PtaaS) model, security certification process enables software and internet companies to navigate release cycles faster.
Cobalt states that there are three big problems with the traditional pentesting model:
- Through specialized consultancies, skills are mostly accessible at the local level. This runs counter to the increasingly globalized nature of today’s workforce and security community, and prevents pentesters from working in a truly agile, collaborative way.
- The consultancy structure means getting a pentest up and running is slow and cumbersome, and based on which testers in the team have spare capacity, rather than whether their expertise makes them suitable for a particular job.
- The output of a pentest is typically a static PDF, making it hard for data to make its way to developers in a form that allows them to patch vulnerabilities, and raises the risk they will go unaddressed. This can lead to headline-making breaches, such as the 2017 Equifax data breach, which stem from a failure to patch known vulnerabilities.
Jacob Hansen, co-founder and CEO of Cobalt said,
“Organizations do business globally and digitally, yet traditional pentesting is delivered locally via a PDF. The pentesting industry doesn’t need another cool tool, it needs people and process innovation. That is why we created a way to engage the best cybersecurity talent, via our pentest management platform, allowing customers to move from a static pentest to platform-driven pentest programs. Cobalt ultimately drives better security and improves return on investment for each customer.”