It Pays To Be A Hacker — HackerOne Raises $25M

HackerOne, which offers a “bug bounty” service wherein companies can hire and pay hackers to locate product vulnerabilities, has raised $25 million in a series B round.

The latest financing activity brings the total raised by the company to $34 million. In the series B funding, NEA led the overall investment activity, and Benchmark, which was the lead investor in the previous round, also participated, according to TechCrunch.

The roster of investors this time around also included some individual names, such as Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. The individual investor list also extends to include Digital Sky Technologies Partner Yuri Milner and Zenefits COO David Sacks.

As noted by TechCrunch, the HackerOne platform uses social networking and gaming attributes to uncover vulnerabilities and share them with platform users. The companies that enlist HackerOne’s services offer the hackers compensation if they do find holes. Each participant in the system gets a rating. The platform so far has unmasked 10,000 vulnerabilities, a milestone that has netted hackers $3 million in payments from HackerOne client companies, CTO Alex Rice told TechCrunch. And the client roster includes luminaries such as Twitter, Adobe and Yahoo.

“The world is opening up to the idea that traditional technology solutions have absolutely been failing us,” Rice told TechCrunch. “Even large organizations with big security teams are feeling it. You can’t solve it in isolation.” The executive went on to note that the HackerOne platform represents a method by which companies can spot technology gaps developers might have missed, simply by having numerous people closely examining the same problem.

“Try to hack [them]. If you’re successful, they’ll pay you fairly for the information,” Rice told the site, in reference to the HackerOne client base.

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