Kusari – a software supply chain security startup – recently announced it raised $8 million through combined investments in pre-seed and seed round funding. The seed funding round was led by J2 Ventures and co-led by Glasswing Ventures with participation from Unusual Ventures, which previously invested $2 million in pre-seed funding.
The company launched in June 2022 to address the lack of transparency within the software supply chain and development lifecycle, which can lead to costly security vulnerabilities. And Cybersecurity Ventures recently reported that the global annual cost of software supply chain attacks to businesses will reach $60 billion in 2025 and is expected to increase to $138 billion by 2031. Transparency into the software supply chain will enable organizations to identify potential weak points and resolve issues faster, helping them maintain trust with partners and minimize risk.
Kusari’s founders Tim Miller, Michael Lieberman, and Parth Patel are seasoned navigators of software supply chains with experience leading supply chain security and cloud engineering at Citi, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), Bridgewater Associates, and Raytheon. And they have personally dealt with the complicated problem of securing software delivery while enabling developer productivity within highly regulated, security-conscious environments.
The founding team offers technical leadership and guidance in the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), which brings together the industry’s most important open source security initiatives and the individuals and companies that support them. And the Kusari founders also have created many open source projects, including Graph for Understanding Artifact Composition (GUAC) – which is supported by industry-leading financial services and technology companies, including Yahoo!, Guidewire, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, and ClearAlpha Technologies.
Open source libraries include the majority of most software written today. And each relies on other libraries, creating a complicated tree of dependencies. Securing a software supply chain starts with understanding how each piece is put together. Plus, it can be deceivingly difficult for an organization to understand what this looks like, as modern software development practices work to hide this complexity in favor of easy development.
Kusari introduced and achieved market validation for GUAC last year to address this specific problem. GUAC is an open source tool that addresses the lack of transparency by organizing software supply chain information, like software bills of materials (SBOMs), into a knowledge graph. This project has a diverse community of 50 contributors and has garnered 1.1k GitHub stars.
Kusari will utilize the funding to accelerate and build on its continued momentum in developing software supply chain security solutions that enable organizations to achieve actionable insights, reduce incident response costs, and relieve the burden on security and developer teams.
KEY QUOTES:
“Identifying where vulnerabilities lie in your software supply chain is complex and time-consuming. With the ever-increasing number of vulnerable packages discovered each year, organizations need a single source of truth about their code. Kusari will be that source of end-to-end transparency and will bring about insights for users to drive more secure outcomes for their organizations. Our focus is on helping users solve their very real security problems.”
— Tim Miller, co-founder and CEO of Kusari
“Kusari’s blend of team, technology, and significant adoption, even at this early stage, position them to be a market leader. Our initial indication from government agencies for what they’re building revealed a massive commercial market. GUAC’s potential cannot be overstated.”
— Jonathan Bronson, Ph.D., co-founder and Managing Partner of J2 Ventures
“Code breaches are increasingly becoming a top priority for Chief Information Security Officers. In an era where software supply chain attacks are on the rise, the demand for stringent security measures has never been more critical. At the helm of Kusari, a team of seasoned industry veterans, including Tim, Michael, and Parth, are steering the company toward new heights. We are immensely proud of our investment in Kusari. Their unparalleled knowledge and innovative approach position them at the cutting edge, as they lead the charge in defining and delivering groundbreaking security solutions in this vital and evolving space.”
— Kleida Martiro, Partner, Glasswing Ventures
