Snyk

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Founders: Guy Podjarny, Danny Grander & Assaf Hefetz
Founding: 2015
Mission: Empowering the world’s developers to build fast, while staying secure
Employees: 1000, with approximately 20% currently based in Boston
Workplace: Flexible/Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series G
Investors: Investors include Accel, boldstart ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Sands Capital, ServiceNow and Tiger Global
Key Customers: Customers include industry leaders such as Asurion, Google, Intuit, MongoDB, New Relic, Revolut and Salesforce
Glassdoor Rating: 4.3
Valuation (estimated): $7.4B

Snyk, which stands for “So Now You Know” and is pronounced like sneak, is the inventor and now leader of the growing developer security space. Back in 2015, Snyk founder Guy Podjarny recognized that the future of cybersecurity depended on one thing: developer adoption. 

Guy and his fellow founders, Danny & Assaf, all worked together in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) before pursuing successful careers in DevOps. Another company founded by Guy, Blaze, was acquired by Akamai in 2012. They all saw the evolution of developer tools and their maturing needs up close. But how do you get developers to adopt security tools?

Worldwide, there are approximately 30 million software developers today helping to build our collective digital future. Shouldn’t they be equipped to secure it as well? Snyk was founded on top of the critical insight that “the way to get developers to embrace security is to build a developer-tool company, not a security company. A company that puts the developers’ needs and the developers’ experience at the center.” (source)

The Snyk team got to work creating an initial product, and eventually a comprehensive, unified platform, that would embed security throughout the entire software development lifecycle, consistently checking for vulnerabilities as they worked. 

As DevSecOps has become increasingly mainstream, Snyk has achieved rapid growth, reaching unicorn status within just four years of launching. Today, Snyk supports 2,500+ customers who have fixed over 5.1M vulnerabilities in 2022 alone. They did so in a way seamless to how developers work, increasing individual productivity while reducing overall organizational risk.  

Peter McKay, an initial investor and Board member, was brought on as CEO in June of 2019 to help usher in the company’s next crucial phases of growth. Prior to helming Snyk, Peter led multiple software companies through hypergrowth including Watchfire (acquired by IBM), Desktone (acquired by VMWare) and Veeam. Peter has led Snyk through tremendous growth since coming on board, most recently leading Snyk into the application security posture management (APSM) market with its acquisition of Enso Security.

In addition to its Boston headquarters, Snyk maintains additional global “hub offices: in London, Tel Aviv and Singapore. The company grew revenue 100% year over year in 2022 and had net revenue retention of 130%. In 2023, Snyk has been named to CNBC’s 2023 Disruptor 50 list, and was named a leader in both the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing and The Forrester Wave: Software Composition Analysis, Q2 2023 report.

Operators to Know (Locally):

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Snyk team as I’m sure I missed additional up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired (Locally):

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • Could you share some details about the onboarding process & training for new employees?
  • What are the biggest challenges and company goals over the next 6-12 months?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in the second half of 2023 // teams that need the most help?
  • What is the long term vision for the company?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Snyk you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team disrupt the legacy cybersecurity industry. See you around town!

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