NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CertiK, the leading New York-based global blockchain and Web3 security firm, today announced the completion of an $88 million oversubscribed Series B3 funding round. This investment is led by Insight Partners, Tiger Global and Advent International, with participation from Goldman Sachs and existing investors such as Sequoia and Lightspeed Venture Partners. This latest funding now brings CertiK’s valuation to $2 billion in just 3 months from its last round of funding. This is the fourth round of capital raised by CertiK in the past nine months, totaling $230 million.
Blockchain security continues to be in strong demand, which has led to substantial growth at CertiK as a category leader. Following a substantial loss of $1.3 billion worth of cryptocurrency in 2021, 2022 is already continuing that trend, with cryptocurrency losses projected to be much higher than last year. In the last three months, the cryptocurrency industry witnessed over $1 billion in cryptocurrency losses due to four major bridging attacks (Ronin Network, Wormhole, Qubit Finance, and Meter.io), as well as several lending attacks. rapid; both types of attacks seem to be in style this year.
CertiK’s mission is to secure the Web3 world. It accomplishes this mission through a suite of end-to-end security services, providing customers with a one-stop-shop for all their security needs. To date, CertiK has protected more than $300 billion in crypto assets for more than 3,200 enterprise clients. CertiK’s audit service provides pre-deployment auditing and formal verification for smart contracts, blockchain protocols and Web3 applications, while Skynet provides 24/7 active on-chain monitoring of security threats. CertiK also recently launched its Know Your Customer (“KYC”) and fraud investigation service this year. CertiK believes that KYC is the missing link in most competitive bids to help prevent malicious intent, i.e. rug pulling, by project owners. Overall, the CertiK leaderboard allows for transparency for its community and builds trust and visibility for the projects listed there.
CertiK’s products and services continue to show strong demand, supporting incredible revenue growth for the company. By the year 2021, CertiK saw its revenue increase 12 times while its profits increased 3000 times. Even with the temporary downturn in the crypto market, CertiK’s Q1 2022 year-over-year Web3 security revenue grew 4x. According to CoinMarketCap data, CertiK serves 60% of all listed blockchain projects that use third-party security auditing services.
CertiK’s leadership and tremendous growth have already been widely recognized by the industry. In March 2022, CertiK received awards for the CB Insights Blockchain 50 Award, listed as the Only Blockchain Security Company, and the Globee Awards, Award for Global Excellence in Cybersecurity.
“CertiK is a mass-market, mission-critical blockchain cybersecurity platform and has already become a clear industry leader with a high-quality product that provides end-to-end security for blockchain, smart contracts and Web3,” said Steve Ward, Managing Director of Insight Partners. “We look forward to partnering with CertiK’s best-in-class founding team, complete with a team of cryptosecurity thought leaders as they continue to grow and scale.”
“We are excited to invest in CertiK as a leader in developing critically needed cybersecurity solutions for the Web3/DeFi market,” said Eric Noeth, Partner at Advent International. “The decentralized internet running on the blockchain has experienced high levels of security breaches and is in dire need of the kind of effective solutions that CertiK provides. We look forward to partnering with the CertiK team as they continue their tremendous drive to make blockchains more secure and higher performing, while giving consumers much-needed visibility into security considerations in new projects. and existing”.
“Goldman Sachs is pleased to be an investor in CertiK, a leading security platform for the blockchain and Web3 ecosystem,” said Oli Harris, CEO of Goldman Sachs. “As we see continued growth in use cases and assets in decentralized applications, the solutions CertiK is building will be integral to securing the ecosystem, helping to accelerate innovation and adoption of these new technologies.”
This new round of funding, along with revenue generated from KYC, Skynet and Security Leaderboard services, will be used for the development and operation of more innovative and data-driven security products. “Given the increasing trends in rug pulling, we now see KYC playing an important role in Web3 security,” said CertiK founder and CEO Ronghui Gu. “KYC, along with smart contract auditing and 24/7 threat monitoring, will further strengthen our offering around end-to-end Web3 security services.”
CertiK continues to recruit top-tier product and development talent to help deliver on its end-to-end product strategy. CertiK recently invested in the hiring of Kevin Liu, CertiK’s director of products. Mr. Liu is a seasoned product and engineering leader with more than 20 years of global experience in the technology industry, with a focus on media and telecommunications. Prior to CertiK, Kevin was a founding member of FreeWheel (a Comcast company) where he held various leadership roles, including Vice President of Products and Vice President of Engineering. He also served as General Manager, China and Ads CTO, at iflix. As CPO at CertiK, Kevin will be responsible for leading product strategy across the company, laying the groundwork for blockchain application security initiatives, and providing input to the community, project owners, and other stakeholders.
About CertiK
CertiK’s mission is to secure the Web3 world. Starting with blockchain, CertiK brings cutting-edge innovations from academia to the enterprise, enabling mission-critical applications to be built securely and securely. Based in New York City, CertiK was founded by computer science professors Ronghui Gu and Zhong Shao. CertiK is backed by industry leaders including Insight Partners, Tiger Global, Sequoia, Coatue Management, Advent International, Goldman Sachs, Lightspeed, Hillhouse Capital, Binance, Coinbase Ventures and more.
