Cybersecurity Firm Snyk Reaches $4.7 Billion Valuation in Round

Katie Roof (Bloomberg) -- Cybersecurity platform Snyk Ltd. said it has closed a $300 million funding round that gives it a valuation of $4.7 billion, quadrupling its value since the start of 2020.

The transaction included both primary and secondary offerings, with the company getting $175 million in new capital. That brings the total raised by Snyk, which was founded in 2015, to $470 million.

The round was co-led by venture firms Accel and Tiger Global Management. Other investors included Addition, BlackRock Inc., Boldstart Ventures, Canaan Partners, Coatue, GV, Salesforce Ventures and Stripes. The round also included new investors such as Atlassian Ventures and Franklin Templeton.

Snyk provides a platform that allows developers to automatically integrate security in their existing work flows. The platform includes secure components, such as code and open source libraries, to develop so-called cloud-native applications.

Incorporating security features in software as it’s being developed is needed to help counter increasingly sophisticated attacks, the company contends.

Ping Li, a partner at Accel who is joining Snyk’s board, said his firm invested partly because of the changing nature of security threats, including by nation-states.

“I just see these attacks compounding,” Li said in an interview. “It seems like it’s an arms race. I don’t know if it ever gets solved.”

Snyk’s valuation has climbed sharply during the past year. It was valued at more than $1 billion in a $150 million funding round in January 2020. Last September, it secured a $2.6 billion valuation with a $200 million investment.

Snyk Chief Executive Officer Peter McKay said in an interview that the Boston-based company’s goal is to go public over the next couple years. He added that he sees an initial public offering, rather than a merger with a blank-check company, as “the right move for us.”