Synack, a startup that has created the industry's first system to safely crowdsource security testing, announced today that it has closed a $1.5 million seed round financing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock Partners, Wing Venture Partners, Allegis Capital, and Derek Smith, CEO of Shape Security.

'Synack is developing stealth technologies that will form a new standard for vulnerability discovery. Companies like Google and Facebook have demonstrated that using global white hat researchers is an outstanding way to identify security problems and Synack can deliver this capability to any commercial company without compromising security, privacy, and confidentiality,' said Ted Schlein, general partner, KPCB.

The nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies reported last month that cybercrime may reach $100 billion per year. According to a recent study of security vulnerability rewards programs from the University of California, Berkeley, crowdsourced white hat testing programs were more demonstrably effective than hiring full-time security researchers. Synack's founders have leveraged their experience at the National Security Agency to deliver a solution that finds and vets the very best computer scientist researchers around the world and applies their unique skills to vulnerability testing with hundreds of different research perspectives applied to target technologies. This provides the first end-to-end testing environment with massive scalability.

'We were looking for technology which would go beyond any one company's testing methodology,' said Derek Smith, CEO of Shape Security. 'Synack gives us a holistic end-to-end view of our security posture, derived from hundreds of different researchers with different backgrounds, to ensure that Shape's own revolutionary security product is tested against the world's most advanced attacks.'

'The deep experience of our investors in all aspects of information security, and their track record in choosing disruptive technologies, make them ideal partners to bring Synack to market,' said Jay Kaplan, CEO of Synack.

About Synack
Based in Menlo Park, CA, Synack has created the first system to safely crowdsource security vulnerability testing in a military-grade trusted environment. Their proprietary technology allows companies to safely engage leading global security researchers to test their systems in highly efficient virtual private testing environments (VPTE). Incubated at TechStars, Synack was founded in 2013 by security experts Jay Kaplan, CEO, and Dr. Mark Kuhr, CTO. Visit www.synack.com to learn more.