BluBracket, an early stage startup that focuses on keeping source code repositories secure, even in distributed environments, announced a $12 million Series A today.
Evolution Equity Partners led the round with help from existing investors Unusual Ventures, Point72 Ventures, SignalFire and Firebolt Ventures. When combined with the $6.5 million seed round we reported on last year, the company has raised $19.5 million so far.
As you might imagine, being able to secure code in distributed environments came in quite handy when much of the technology world moved to work from home last year. BluBracket co-founder and COO Ajay Arora says that the pandemic forced many organizations to look carefully at how they secured their code base.
“So the anxiety organizations had about making sure their source code was secure and that it wasn’t leaking, from that standpoint that was a big tailwind for us. [With companies moving to a] completely remote development workforce, and with code being so important to their business as intellectual property, they needed to get that visibility into what vulnerabilities were there,” Arora explained.
Even prior to the pandemic, the company was finding they were gaining traction with developers and security pros by using a bottom up approach offering a free community version of the software. Having that free version as a top of the funnel for their sales motion was also helpful once COVID hit full force.
Today, Arora says the company has multiple thousands of developers, DevOps and SecOps users across dozens of organizations using the company’s suite of products. The big reference company right now is Priceline, but he says there are other big names that would prefer not to be public about it.
The company currently has 30 employees with plans to double that by the end of the year, and he says that building diversity and inclusion into the hiring process is part of the company’s core values, and part of how the executive team gets measured.
“We’re big believers in putting our money where our mouth is and one of the OKRs for me and my co-founder [CEO Prakash Linga], or one of the things that we’re actually compensated for is how well we are doing in building diversity and inclusion on the team,” he said. He adds that the recruiters that they are using are also being held to the same standard when it comes to providing a diverse set of candidates for open positions.
The company launched in 2018 and the founding team came from Vera, a startup that helped secure documents in motion. That company was sold to HelpSystems in December 2020 after Arora and Linga had left to start BluBracket.
