Executives from some of the world’s biggest tech companies have invested in a new platform called Mondoo helping developers track and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities in their operating systems.
Senior figures at MongoDB, Cisco, OneLogin, Github, Microsoft, Google and Red Hat have all put money into the $12m Series A round for the company, which is promising to “reinvent the way DevOps does security”.
Speaking to Sifted, Mondoo CEO and cofounder Soo Choi, said that she was proud of the company’s large range of high-profile investors, which is now 50% women and people of colour.
“I really love our angel list… What we are offering to the world is the reinvention of the way that DevOps sees and does security… for that to succeed we need people with really diverse viewpoints,” she said.
Soo explained to Sifted why Mondoo was different, saying that traditionally at companies cybersecurity is done by the security team, which then passes on instructions about technical fixes and issues to the engineering team.
She says that Mondoo is attempting to upend that model providing tools for the engineers themselves to assess their own cybersecurity. “We want to spread security across the entire organisation,” says Soo.
Soo, who previously worked at NASA, said that having security integrated into engineering was more important than ever these days as hackers were getting more sophisticated: “If you believe that software is eating the world, then hackers are having a feast.”
The Series A funding round was led by the London-based investor Atomico. The company also announced a previously undisclosed seed round led by Firstminute Capital with participation from System.One.
Based in San Francisco and Berlin, Mondoo was founded in 2020 by Soo, Christoph Hartmann, and Dominik Richter, who previously worked together at DevOps automation company Chef Software.
Sasha Vidiborskiy, principal at Atomico, said: “We believe that Mondoo is uniquely positioned to become a new global category leader in the cybersecurity space with a remarkable new product built for developer-centric business models.”
DevOps angels include Tom Killalea, MongoDB Chairman; Marianna Tessel, Cisco board member and Intuit CTO; Vanessa Pegueros, OneLogin (and former Docusign) CISO; Dr Nicole Forsgren, Github and Microsoft VP of Research; Bradley Horowitz, Google VP of Product; Andrew Clay Shafer, Red Hat VP of transformation; Mirko Novakovic, Instana cofounder; Eric Quidenus-Wahlforss, SoundCloud and Dance cofounder.
