See Nullify's Press Release in Startup Daily and The Australian.
Nullify, an Australian cybersecurity AI start-up, has announced the closing of a $1.1M pre-seed funding round led by OIF Ventures. The funds will be used to scale Nullify, a security bot that helps software developers and security teams detect and fix security vulnerabilities in their code within existing workflows, without slowing down the speed of development. Nullify is already being used by enterprises and scale-ups globally in early access, with a public launch set for the end of June.
The founding team, consisting of Shantanu Kulkarni, Tim Thacker and Tony Mao spent time building and teaching cloud cybersecurity courses at the University of New South Wales before working in cloud security roles and scale-ups where they observed persistent challenges around secure software development across the financial, health insurance and technology industries.
“With developers today pushing code twice as fast, security teams are struggling to secure software at the pace it’s being built. Nullify is built for organisations to enable their developers, and not just security teams, to own the security of the software they build. By leveraging both open-source tools and generative AI, Nullify can detect, prioritise and fix security vulnerabilities for developers, saving them hours each week on security work and allowing them to spend more time building software.”
said Shantanu, co-founder and CEO of Nullify.
OIF Investor, Andrew Yeo, said:
“Nullify's core value lies in its ability to help businesses distribute security ownership across software development and security teams without compromising on the speed of development. OIF is thrilled to support Shan, Tim and Tony in their vision to become the AI security autopilot for all developer and security teams as software, AI and vulnerabilities proliferate globally.”
Nullify becomes Australia’s first company to join the AI developer tooling arms race.
The funding comes at a crucial time for cyber as recent high-profile cyber-attacks highlight the need for stronger cyber-security measures. In response, the Australian government has introduced new national cybersecurity requirements for businesses, which are estimated to cost the industry up to$9 billion. Australian enterprises are facing increasing pressure to adopt greater security testing capabilities as the cyber threat landscape evolves rapidly, with principles for secure software development jointly published by ‘The Quad’ nations at the recent G7 summit highlighting the criticality of securing software supply chains.
Hackers can exploit weaknesses in software supply chains to gain access to businesses' networks and steal sensitive information. By adopting Nullify, businesses address this risk by detecting, triaging and fixing vulnerabilities in their software supply chain.
Nullify's pre-seed round is led by OIF Ventures who add Nullify to a growing list of cyber investments, including Malcolm Turnbull and In-Q-Tel-backed Kasada and XM Cyber, which was acquired for approximately $1 billion AUD in 2021.
Former XM Cyber founding team Adi Ashkenazy and Zini Shahar - who now run security advisory firm Skylight Cyber - also co-invested in Nullify with OIF alongside Blacknova Ventures and Cyrise,with Adi adding:
"Previously, embedding security testing into engineering processes has been costly and time-consuming, often at the expense of agility. Nullify provides a way to instantly enable developer teams to own security at scale in a frictionless, consolidated and low-touch way.”
What's next?
With the funding, Nullify plans to expand its product suite with new technologies to meet the rapidly evolving needs of the cyber-security market. Nullify is already used by several companies in Australia and around the world in early access, with a public launch set for June.