Recently I shared with you our excitement about our agreement with TA Associates (TA) to make a significant growth investment in Veracode. I am pleased to share that the deal is now closed, opening up a tremendous new chapter in Veracode’s journey.
In the weeks since the announcement, people I speak with every day – customers, prospective customers, analysts, journalists who cover the critical software security space, and other Veracoders – ask me, “What do you envision together with TA for this next chapter?”
Veracode’s history is rooted in bringing awareness to the topic of software security and leading the market to action in this area. Going back to 1998, our founder and CTO Chris Wysopal, also known as Weld Pond, along with his colleagues from the hacker group The L0pht, testified to the US Congress about the importance of securing the software and networks that run the internet. Their forward-thinking led to the formation of Veracode, with a vision to provide a scalable, automated platform for organizations to secure the software they were building, buying, and using from the open-source community.
We have consistently been a market leader and innovated to keep expanding this platform vision. Now, our partnership with TA will allow us to accelerate our efforts even further. We are excited to invest in our own R&D and market expansion efforts, while also seeking to grow our product portfolio and revenues through inorganic means. We have demonstrated our ability to successfully combine our platform with new technologies we acquire and through that combination deliver added value to our customers.
In 2018, we acquired SourceClear, a leader in Software Composition Analysis (SCA). Two years later, we acquired the technology behind Veracode Security Labs to better educate developers in software security. Our customers have benefitted from this acquisition – in the 12th edition of our State of Software Security report issued earlier this year, we revealed that developers who take even one Security Labs course fix flaws 35% faster than those who don’t.
To understand why the investment by TA in Veracode will benefit all those in our ecosystem, let’s look at TA’s track record. Founded in Boston in 1968, TA has made over 250 tech investments in its history and invested in more than 550 companies total. As a growth investor, TA invests in companies that have high-quality business models with highly recurring revenue and profitability. TA focuses on accelerating the growth of these companies in which it invests by helping deliver unmatched value to their customers. Since 1990, 130 companies in which TA invested have gone public.
We look forward to a partnership with TA that provides similar benefits to our business and our customers.
Earlier this month, with support from TA, we announced the acquisition of technology from Jaroona, whose machine learning and remediation technology will, across our platform, find and propose more advanced code fixes, with expanded support for traditional and cloud-native programming languages and frameworks. We have played a significant role in shaping the software security market in automating the ‘finding’ of vulnerabilities. With this acquisition, we intend to do the same for automating the ‘fixing of vulnerabilities.’
At the same time, our product team continues to innovate on our core offerings. In rapid succession, we’ve added API scanning and the ability to find log4j applications and APIs in a run-time environment to our Dynamic Analysis scanning engine, additional language and framework support for our Static Analysis product, and the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) API for Software Composition Analysis (SCA), enabling delivery of an inventory of components within an application with insight into the relationships between the components. We’ve been granted Authority to Operate (ATO) by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), paving the way for our full government FedRAMP ATO. You’ll be hearing very soon about the direction we’re taking the Veracode platform, to truly be a bridge between security and development teams.
The cybersecurity market is highly fragmented, and I often hear from customers a strong desire to consolidate critical parts of their security programs with a trusted partner. Our vision has always been to be the cloud platform of choice where customers can have multiple software security needs met across their software development lifecycle - for both developers and security teams. TA’s investment in Veracode enables us to execute that vision at an accelerated pace. I am truly excited to officially embark on that journey with Veracoders and our new partners at TA and to keep helping our customers secure the software that runs their world.