Last weekend I finished re-reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens as it really helps reflect on the world we live in today: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …”
There is much to be thankful for today, even as we work together to respond to the unfortunate COVID-19 pandemic. Our Bugcrowd team is safe and healthy, our researchers and customers continue to be active, the state of our company is solid, we continue to add value to all of our business partners, and we are even making the best of tough times by collaborating openly, communicating transparently, and working out collectively while we are in quarantine.
We are in a time of global disruption and we don’t know what’s on the other side. But, I am confident in the resolve of our community to find a way! As the world adjusts to the disruption, the requirements change, as well. Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, has written that “revolutions have occurred throughout history when new technologies and novel ways of perceiving the world trigger a profound change in economic systems and social structures.” We are in the midst of such a revolution today, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As Schwab predicted, “emerging technologies and broad-based innovation are diffusing much faster and more widely than in previous [revolutions].” We are observing this process up-close at Bugcrowd, with hundreds of thousands of distributed cybersecurity researchers–not bound by location, time or employment–connected together by the Bugcrowd platform, united in strengthening cybersecurity for the world’s leading organizations. With the rapid move to remote work, and the continued talent gap in cybersecurity, we have seen demand for our services accelerate like never before. In fact, vulnerability submissions month over month are higher than they’ve ever been before–March 2020 alone saw a 20% increase from our previous record–and more of the Crowd is actively bug hunting and submitting during this crisis.
Bugcrowd is uniquely positioned to deliver security solutions to our customers that meet their requirements for any attack surface and from anywhere – especially important in today’s sudden remote-first business driven by COVID-19. We unlock the creativity of our Crowd on a platform that intelligently creates a closed loop security workflow – matching the most suitable researchers to test an attack surface based on their skills and trust scores, rewarding them with both intrinsic and extrinsic incentives to drive their effort and motivation. We founded the company in 2012 and pioneered the Crowdsourced Security-as-a-Service model, launching our first bug bounty programs that same year to find and secure vulnerabilities before bad actors could exploit them. Our vision was not just to make cybersecurity better, but to dramatically improve the availability of highly skilled resources and deliver substantial ROI to our customers through contextual intelligence that enabled actions which made their security posture stronger.
This week, Bugcrowd announced new growth funding of $30 million. We will use these funds to grow our go-to-market scale, further develop our platform, and secure new partnerships that will complement our strategy and accelerate speed to value and market. Where do we go from here? The fight against cybercriminals is never-ending and the attack surface is constantly expanding. To combat this, the demand for a continuous vulnerability testing solution that applies human intelligence has increased. Bugcrowd is at the intersection of these demands. Our Community Response approach combines the Crowd’s human ingenuity to find vulnerabilities and the intelligence of a multi-product platform to deliver guaranteed expertise and immediate ROI for security at scale.
We are excited to see where the year takes us as we continue to define the crowdsourced cybersecurity market with new and innovative security solutions for our customers and expand our world-class researcher crowd with the goal to make our digitally connected world safer. At the same time, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we urge all of you to not let complacency set in as you keep yourself safe and support our community as it comes together to help slow the spread of this virus. Please stay home, be safe, and share what you can to help our emergency responders and health care professionals who are selflessly helping thousands. Thank you, we are humbled by our emergency responders and health care professionals dedication and sacrifice.
