Fuzzbuzz, an automated software security platform founded in Kitchener-Waterloo, has raised a $3.6 million CAD seed round led by Fuel Capital, with participation from Homebrew and Susa Ventures.
“Fuzzing has the potential to massively advance the vulnerability testing of code bases.”
The company is using the majority of the funds to make its first key engineering hires, which will allow Fuzzbuzz to scale its platform, iterate on fuzzing algorithms, and build out fuzzing support for Java, Ruby, and Javascript. Various angel investors also participated in the round, including Solomon Hykes, co-founder of Docker, Florian Leibert, co-founder of Mesosphere, and Ben Porterfield, co-founder of Looker.
“We are so excited to be working with Fuzzbuzz,” said Chris Howard, general partner at Fuel Capital. “While still in its infancy, fuzzing has the potential to massively advance the vulnerability testing of code bases, helping developers scale the process, particularly as they shift toward continuous deployment.”
Fuzzbuzz is a platform that continuously tests code for bugs and vulnerabilities with fuzzing. Fuzzing is a software testing methodology that detects obscure bugs that developers often miss. The software can categorize and de-duplicate each bug found, and then notify users through tools like Slack and Jira. At Y Combinator’s most recent demo day Fuzzbuzz said it had begun fuzzing code for organizations including Ethereum, Google, and IPFS. Now the startup is saying that those partnerships are only in the early stages and Fuzzbuzz has just begun to fuzz open source projects with Ethereum and IPFS, and clarified that it is working on Google open source project Syzkaller.
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The company was co-founded in 2018 by Sabera Hussain, Andrei Serban, and Everest Munro-Zeisberger. It completed one $25,000 CAD seed round from Waterloo-based incubator, Velocity, where the company was founded. Fuzzbuzz is also a graduate of Y Combinator’s most recent cohort.
After Fuzzbuzz co-founder Everest Munro-Zeisberger worked on the Google ClusterFuzz team, the co-founders realized the opportunity to bring fuzzing to smaller companies that lack the resources of larger corporations. The startup said its platform allows companies of any size to fuzz without having to hire engineers to create a strong in-house fuzzing pipeline.
“We are bullish on Fuzzbuzz because we’ve seen the immense opportunity that exists when technologies that large consumer companies develop in-house to help them scale certain processes are made accessible to smaller companies with limited resources,” Howard said. “We’ve seen it firsthand with Cloudera commercializing Hadoop, Pagerduty evolving out of the team that carried old-school pagers to report incidents when they worked at Amazon, and Mesosphere developing Mesos as Twitter and Airbnb were scaling.”
Image courtesy Velocity.
Update: this story has been updated to clarify that Fuzzbuzz is only in the early stages of working with Ethereum, Google, and IPFS.