Astra Security, a security platform with continuous vulnerability scanning and pentests, announced the closing of a growth capital round—led by Emergent Ventures, with participation from the Neon Fund, Better Capital, Blume Ventures, and PointOne Capital.
The funding will accelerate development and build capabilities to uncover vulnerabilities in cloud environments. And the company also plans to double down its focus on using AI to give developers and security engineers the ability to build security detections. Plus, the company has been building its platform since 2018 while remaining cash-positive.
Last year, Astra Security uncovered nearly 5,500 vulnerabilities per day for its customers with its AI-powered pentest platform. And this number is expected to increase threefold by the end of the year as cyber threats continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace. With AI, the speed at which code is being shipped increases rapidly. This means attackers have a larger attack surface area to find vulnerabilities. AI has become equally popular among hackers for finding loopholes at scale, which can lead to more breaches.
Over 800 engineering teams in over 70 countries utilize Astra Security. And AI powers the platform and can constantly mimic hacker behavior to check applications for vulnerabilities through fast detections. This includes PTaaS (Penetration Testing as a Service), a DAST vulnerability scanner, and an API Security Platform working together to find 13,000+ vulnerabilities. Last year, Astra Security helped its customers discover and prioritize remediation of over two million vulnerabilities.
Astra Security founders Shikhil Sharma and Ananda Krishna have been hackers and builders for over a decade. They first helped big brands like Microsoft, Adobe, AT&T, Yahoo, and Blackberry find critical vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. This led to the creation of Astra Security and the company’s focus on an AI-powered platform to advance the cybersecurity industry.
Astra’s growth round totaled $2.7 million, and the company is rapidly gaining traction among leading organizations. Last year, more than 25% of their customers were mid-sized and large companies, including Loom, HackerRank, ITC, Olx Autos, Mamaearth, Muthoot Finance, Bonusly Singapore Trade Exchange, Oscilar, University of Cambridge, CompTIA, and Prime Healthcare.
KEY QUOTES:
“The cybercrime landscape is becoming increasingly complex with AI-based attacks. Traditional, periodic pentesting is no longer enough in today’s threat environment, and Astra Security is moving more businesses to continuous pentesting to stay ahead of hackers. The engineering world has become agile, collaborative, and automation-driven, but the cybersecurity industry has lagged behind. It’s our mission to breathe life into the security space by integrating AI, adopting a hacker’s mindset, and making the tech easy and accessible.”
- Shikhil Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Astra Security
“Security is increasingly shifting to the hands of developers, while security teams find themselves more overwhelmed than ever. While pentests have been around for over a decade, they are overdue for an AI-first update—simplifying and streamlining the process. We’re focused on removing the frustration of continuous security monitoring so businesses can get on with everything else.”
• ⁃ Ananda Krishna, co-founder and CTO of Astra Security
