Astra Security, a security platform has raised $2.7 million in a growth capital round led by Emergent Ventures, along with participation from the Neon Fund, Better Capital, Blume Ventures, and PointOne Capital.
The funds raised will be used to accelerate development and build capabilities to uncover vulnerabilities in cloud environments. The company also plans to double down its focus on using AI to give developers and security engineers the ability to build security detections. The company has been building its platform since 2018 while remaining cash-positive.
“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,” said 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,” said Ananda Krishna, co-founder and CTO of Astra Security.
Founded in 2018 by Shikhil Sharma and Ananda Krishna, Astra Security is a cyber security SaaS company simplifying otherwise chaotic penetration with its Pentest Platform. Astra Security’s AI-powered offensive vulnerability scanning engine emulates hacker behavior to scan applications for 10,000+ security tests.
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 that all work together to find over 13,000 vulnerabilities.
800+ companies across the globe use Astra Security. Last year, Astra Security uncovered 2,000,000+ vulnerabilities for its customers, saving customers $69 million+ in potential losses due to security vulnerabilities.
Last year, Astra Security uncovered nearly 5,500 vulnerabilities per day for its customers with its AI-powered pentest platform.
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.
