Web3 cybersecurity startup Immunefi today announced that it has closed a $24 million funding round.

The Series A round was led by Framework Ventures with participation from more than a half-dozen other investors, including Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s Next venture capital arm. Immunefi has raised a total of $29.5 million since launching in 2020.

Singapore-based Immunefi provides a cloud platform that Web3 companies can use to host bug bounty programs. A bug bounty program is an initiative through which a company pays external cybersecurity experts to find and report vulnerabilities in its software. By recruiting the help of outside experts, an organization can increase the likelihood that it will find a vulnerability in its software before hackers do.

The company says its bug bounty platform is the most widely used offering of its kind in the blockchain ecosystem. According to the startup, its platform is used by the developers of more than 300 Web3 projects to power their bug bounty programs.

Immunefi’s platform supports projects in several parts of the Web3 ecosystem, including nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, and DeFi. DeFi is the term for blockchain technologies that enable users to trade in financial instruments without intermediates such as brokerage firms. Some of the bug bounty programs powered by by Immunefi’s platform also focus on smart contracts, software workflows that make it possible to automate financial transactions. 

If hackers discover a vulnerability in a Web3 project before a patch is released, they can potentially use it to steal user funds. Immunefi estimates that the vulnerability reports submitted to Web3 developers through its bug bounty platform saved more than $25 billion in user funds. To date, developers have paid more than $60 million to cybersecurity experts as part of bug bounty programs hosted on Immunefi’s platform.

Immunefi’s funding round follows a series of high-profile cyberattacks targeting blockchain platforms. In many of those cyberattacks, hackers managed to steal cryptocurrency and other digital assets belonging to blockchain platforms’ users. 

“Open code and directly monetizable exploits have made web3 the most adversarial software development space in the world,” said founder and Chief Executive Officer Mitchell Amador. “By shifting incentives toward whitehats, Immunefi has already saved billions of dollars of users’ funds.”

Immunefi plans to use its newly closed funding round to grow its team. It currently has 50 employees.

Another blockchain cybersecurity startup, CertiK, raised $88 million in July from a group of high-profile investors led by Insight Partners. The same month, Halborn Inc. closed a $90 million funding round led by Summit Partners. Halborn provides tools and services that help blockchain companies detect vulnerabilities in their software.

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