Crash Override, the creator of the first Engineering Relationship Management (ERM) platform, recently secured $28 million in seed funding, led by GV (Google Ventures) and SYN Ventures, with additional contributions from Blackstone Innovations Investments and Bessemer Venture Partners. This investment will help accelerate product development and expand market reach, while Erik Nordlander from GV and Jay Leek from SYN Ventures join the board of directors.
Modern software environments are complex and often suffer from unclear ownership and limited insight, which can lead to significant financial and reputational damage during incidents. While monitoring tools highlight issues, ERM provides the essential context needed for quick recovery and system resilience.
Crash Override’s ERM platform features the world’s first build inspection technology, which catalogs workloads and maintains a real-time change ledger for full traceability across code, infrastructure, and teams. This technology helps leaders understand modifications in their systems.
Founded in 2022 by John Viega and Mark Curphey, both prominent figures in the security industry, Crash Override aims to enhance developer efficiency. As part of the funding agreement, Blackstone contributed a codebase named Ocular, which enhances the analysis of AI-generated code. A significant portion of Ocular is set to be open-sourced to improve access to security scanning capabilities for enterprises and individual researchers.
KEY QUOTES:
“When software breaks, companies can spend half the day just trying to answer basic questions like ‘what is this?’, ‘who owns it?’, and ‘what changed?’. Instead of bringing 30 people into a triage call, we can provide those answers instantly. Crash Override makes it easy to track the data no one else could before, exposing relationships between code, tools, and teams to cut costs, reduce risk, and get engineers back to building. Our partnership with GV, SYN Ventures, Blackstone, and Bessemer strengthens our ability to bring this clarity to more organizations that are ready to move faster and stay secure.”
John Viega, Co-Founder and CEO of Crash Override
“Every engineering team grapples with sprawling codebases and increasing degrees of complexity in the age of AI. Crash Override is building the definitive system of record for engineering, giving teams the crucial visibility and traceability they desperately need as the explosion of LLM-derived code can introduce new unseen intricacies and vulnerabilities. Founders John Viega and Mark Curphey are security veterans with deep industry ties, and we’re excited to support the team as they deliver essential transparency across the entire software deployment lifecycle.”
Erik Nordlander, General Partner at GV
“We’ve seen countless startups try to address the chaos in modern software delivery, but none have connected the dots like Crash Override. They’re arriving at exactly the right moment, as GenAI accelerates complexity and forces organizations to rethink how they govern engineering.”
Jay Leek, Managing Partner at SYN Ventures
“I’ve worked with the team behind Crash Override for years. They’ve each played a role in moving the industry forward, and this is their most impactful effort yet. For the first time, I can understand how applications flow from build systems into cloud environments in real time. That deployment timeline is incredibly valuable. Just as important is knowing exactly where those artifacts end up, which has become essential for incident response. This level of visibility simply hasn’t existed until now.”
Gabriel Lawrence, VP, Information Security Cyber Protection at Toyota Motor North America
“We built Ocular to help enable our teams to scan and understand code at scale with flexibility and precision. We believe in Crash Override’s mission and see a clear opportunity to bring these capabilities together. The combination of a flexible scanning foundation like Ocular with Crash Override’s vision for engineering relationship management will help drive innovation in how organizations secure and understand their software supply chains.”
Adam Fletcher, Chief Security Officer at Blackstone
