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Cobalt
Additional Info
Website | Cobalt.io |
Company size (employees) | 100 to 499 |
Headquarters Region | North America |
Overview
As a fully remote cybersecurity startup fresh off Series B funding, Cobalt cannot afford to take its foot off the gas. 2020 was an “accelerate” year. 2021 will lay the foundation for global growth as we seek to topple the legacy players in a multibillion dollar industry and define Pentesting as a Service (PtaaS).
Cobalt increased total YoY revenue, announced a move to a remote-first workforce, and added 70+ employees. The momentum will help Cobalt on its quest to engage the best cybersecurity talent, via its PtaaS platform, and enable customers to move from static pentests to platform-driven pentest programs.
Key 2020 milestones:
–Customer momentum: Cobalt will wrap up the year with over 350 new customers, including Chegg and Zenefits, and a Net Promoter Score averaging 70. Current customers include GoDaddy, Vonage, Axel Springer and MuleSoft.
–Record testing: The Cobalt Core — a closed, highly vetted pool of skilled security testers — conducted 1,500+ pentests and discovered over 12,500 vulnerabilities. (The team will distill key learnings from these engagements in the next installment of the annual State of Pentesting Report.)
–Series B funding: In August, Cobalt raised $29 million.
–Business growth: Revenue jumped 59% and the team expanded by 50%, including filling highly strategic senior positions in Product, Sales, Marketing, and Pentest Operations.
Members of the Cobalt Core continued to share insight and knowledge with the security community at large. Cobalt pentesters regularly published findings on vulnerabilities, risk assessments, and other research that allows security testers — and, by extension, the businesses they serve — to maximize the impact of pentesting engagements and elevate society’s overall cybersecurity IQ. One such initiative, Cobalt Academia — which launched in Q3 and is spearheaded by seasoned Core member and Pentest Architect Busra Demir — provides free educational content for pentesters at various stages of their career.
How we are different
--People and process innovation: As Cobalt’s CEO and co-founder, Jacob Hansen, says: “The pentesting industry doesn't need another cool tool, it needs people and process innovation.” Getting a pentest up and running is all too often slow and cumbersome. As a result, most organizations only pentest once or twice a year, despite cybercriminals exploiting software vulnerabilities more and more frequently. Cobalt has turbo charged that weeks-long process, allowing businesses to get a manual pentest up and running in as little as 24 hours. Cobalt has amassed a highly-vetted, battle-tested community of top-tier pentesters who are passionate about their work….and love getting paid to break into something.
--Defining a market category. With game-changing collaboration tools like Slack and Jira revolutionizing the way business gets done, why is the output of a pentest still a static PDF? That format makes it hard for data to make its way to developers in a way that allows them to patch vulnerabilities, and makes it likely that those vulnerabilities will go unaddressed, which can lead to headline-making breaches. Enter PtaaS, which Cobalt pioneered with a platform that automates communication and collaboration between pentesters and developers, provides immediate notification of found vulnerabilities, and supports free re-testing to drive code fixes.
--Solving customer challenges. PtaaS is more effective, easy, and seamless than traditional methods. Cobalt’s technology platform and global pentester community are powering the next generation of agile teams. Our customers testify to the impact of speed, agility, and easy access to quality talent. They prove that we’ve discovered a way to engage the best cybersecurity testers, via our PtaaS platform, ultimately driving better security and ROI for each customer. And because cybersecurity is relevant to any organization that cares about customer data, the ripple effects of Cobalt’s agile technology extend beyond penetration testing, to the entire world of SaaS business. Customer testimonials:https://cobalt.io/customers.