Goldman Sachs joins $88M investment in web3 and blockchain security tech startup CertiK; now valued at $2B

Investment in web3 startups is heating up as investors and venture capital firms pour billions of dollars into the red hot technology space. Today, CertiK, a web3 and blockchain security tech startup, announced it has raised $88 million Series B3 funding  led by Insight Partners, Tiger Global, and Advent International, with participation from Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs and existing investors such as Sequoia and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The announcement comes just a few months after the company’s last funding round, doubling its valuation to $2 billion in just 3 months. This is the fourth round of capital raised by CertiK in the past nine months, altogether totaling $230 million.

In a statement, Certik said it witnessed losses last year totaling $1.3 billion in cryptocurrency due to hacks. With just four months into 2022, Certik estimated that its losses are over $1 billion so far, as a result of four major bridge attacks (Ronin Network, Wormhole, Qubit Finance, and Meter.io). Both bridge-style attacks and flash loans are trending this year, and we predict a lot more incidents of these types this year, further fueling demand for pre-deployment code audits.

Founded in 2018 by computer science professors Ronghui Gu and Zhong Shao, the New York City-based CertiK provides an end-to-end set of security services to enterprises to ensure the correctness and security of their blockchain and web3 projects. To date, CertiK has protected over $300 billion worth of crypto assets for well over 3,200 enterprise clients. CertiK’s auditing service provides pre-deployment auditing and formal verification for smart contracts, blockchain protocols, and Web3 apps, while Skynet provides on-chain 24/7 active monitoring of security threats.

CertiK also recently launched its Know Your Customer (“KYC”) and fraud investigation service this year. CertiK believes KYC is the missing link in most competitive offers for helping prevent malicious intent i.e., rug-pulls, by owners of a project. Overall, CertiK’s leaderboard enables transparency for its community and builds both trust and visibility for the projects that are listed there.

CertiK’s products and services continue to show strong demand, supporting an incredible growth of revenue for the company. For the year 2021, CertiK saw its revenue surge 12x, while its profits surged by 3,000x. Even with the temporary downturn in the crypto market, CertiK’s 2022 Q1, Year-over-Year Web3 security revenue grew by 4x. According to CoinMarketCap data, CertiK serves 60% of all listed blockchain projects that use third-party security audit 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 firm, and the Globee Awards – Cybersecurity Global Excellence Award.

“CertiK is a mission-critical blockchain cybersecurity platform in a massive market and has already become a clear leader in the industry with a high-quality product that provides all-around security for blockchain, smart contracts, and Web3,” said Steve Ward, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “We look forward to partnering with CertiK’s best in class founding team, complete with a team of leading crypto security thought leaders as they continue to grow and Scale-Up.”

“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 that runs 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 it continues its tremendous momentum in making blockchains safer and more performant while also providing consumers with much-needed visibility into security considerations across new and existing projects.”

“Goldman Sachs is excited to be an investor in CertiK, a leading security platform for the blockchain and Web3 ecosystem,” said Oli Harris, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs. “As we see continued growth in use cases and assets on decentralized applications the solutions being built by CertiK will be integral to securing the ecosystem, helping to accelerate innovation and adoption of these novel technologies.”

This new round of funding, coupled 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 increasing trends in rug-pulls, we now see KYC playing an important role in Web3 security,” said CertiK Founder and CEO, Ronghui Gu. “KYC, together with Smart contract auditing and 24/7 monitoring of threats, will further strengthen our offer around end-to-end Web3 security services.”