Bugcrowd Inc., a startup that works with Fortune 500 companies such as MasterCard Inc. to find vulnerabilities in their infrastructure before hackers do, today announced that it has raised $26 million from investors to expand operations. 

Bugcrowd offers a service for running so-called bug bounty programs. The platform allows enterprises to engage the global security community and offer monetary rewards to researchers for finding vulnerabilities. This model’s rising popularity can be credited in large part to tech giants such as Google LLC, which pay out millions of dollars worth of bounties each year.

According to Bugcrowd, its platform automates much of the hands-on work involved in running such initiatives. A centralized dashboard lets enterprise security professionals quickly set up a program tailored for their requirements and manage vulnerability submissions.

One of the service’s main selling points is that a company doesn’t have to evaluate every claim on its own. Instead, Bugcrowd’s internal security personnel assess submissions and highlight the items serious enough to warrant the attention of an organization’s network protection team.

The startup claims that its service enables companies to discover up to eight times as many “critical vulnerabilities” as traditional security assessments. The reason is straightforward: a bug bounty program makes it possible to engage a far bigger number of researchers than what the average enterprise can afford to hire directly.

Bugcrowd will use the new funding to expand its platform’s capabilities. TechCrunch quoted Chief Technology Officer Casey Ellis as saying that one particular priority is to add machine learning into the service. More specifically, Bugcrowd will use algorithms to analyze the data that it collects about bug bounty programs and identify ways of improving vulnerability searches.  

Today’s investment was led by Triangle Peak Partners with participation from over half a dozen returning backers. Bugcrowd has raised a total of $50 million in funding to date.

Image: Bugcrowd