Cyber startup raises $15M to open Baltimore office and expand sales team
With cyberattacks on the rise in the US, a startup with bicoastal founders automating the process of protecting systems has raised millions to reach more customers.
Pixee, founded in 2022, announced a $15 million seed round in May. Its tech addresses a gap in the broader market for cybersecurity products: Many tools exist to automate the search for vulnerabilities, but not to fix those flaws, explained Pixee cofounder and CEO Surag Patel. Right now, firms largely handle that process manually. Pixee uses agentic AI to make sure what's flagged is an issue in the code, and automates repairing the code to avoid attacks, he said.
Software is being created faster than ever before, thanks to generative AI tools — which Patel, who lives in San Francisco, sees as a positive. But with that increase in software comes more technology susceptible to attacks, whether it's developed by a bot or a human.
Pixee's announcement of the raise pointed to a 2024 study, conducted by the market intelligence-focused International Data Corporation with sponsorship by the software company JFrog, that showed that developers are also spending more hours on application security than in previous years.
'This boom of code — with that comes vulnerabilities,' Patel told Technical.ly. 'That's an inevitable reality. And what we need is we need automation to automate the fixing of those vulnerabilities.'
Growing Baltimore roots with funds from Silicon Valley
This is Pixee's first raise, and it was led by Decibel and Wing VC in Palo Alto, with participation from Maryland's venture arm TEDCO and PrimeSet in Dallas. TEDCO contributed $1.5 million to the round.
Patel and his cofounder, Baltimore-based Arshan Dabirsiaghi, will be using the funds to expand Pixee's go-to-market team. Up until now, they've primarily focused on hiring engineers, many of whom live in the Baltimore region. The company recently hired its first sales staffer, per Patel.
'The going-forward plan is: We need to start scaling up the awareness of Pixee,' he said.
Engineers will still be brought on, Patel said, and he hopes to hire 10 employees to join the current staff of about 20 by the end of 2025. The startup is also looking at opening a formal office in the Baltimore area, though the staff currently gets together once a quarter for about a week to work in person.
The founders have been raising capital since shortly after they were founded, per Patel, and it's been a 'quiet' process. The founders reached out to a handful of known investors through previous work.
'For us, we've been so heads-down just building a product, proving out the product and the market, the opportunity,' Patel said, 'and then focusing on the seed funding as secondary, honestly.'
Dabirsiaghi is the cofounder of Baltimore's Contrast Security, which automates identifying vulnerabilities in software. The duo met when Patel joined that cybersecurity firm as its chief strategy officer.
Saving developers time to innovate
The startup self-reports a 76% acceptance rate of changes using the Pixee product. About 30,000 projects are using the firm's open source software, per Patel.
He declined to share how many paying customers Pixee has, but noted he sells the product to large companies with around 300 or more developers. Pixee doesn't focus on a specific industry, but regulated ones in sectors like finance, medicine and the government have shown a lot of interest.
Pixee is in talks with the federal government about contracting services, but Patel declined to share which agencies.
Partnerships are also a core part of Pixee's model, and the company recently announced one with HCLTech to get connected with more customers.
By getting connected to more customers, Patel wants this tool to save effort for developers so they can focus on important things outside of cybersecurity concerns.
'Now they can re-spend that time on the stuff they want to spend it on, which is generally not security, right?' Patel said. 'They want to be building cool features for customers, and things that might drive business or ideas.'
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