Open source software security solution Socket completes US$20 million Series A financing led by a16z

Odaily Planet Daily News Socket, an open source software security solution, announced the completion of a $20 million Series A round of financing, led by a16z, Abstract Ventures, Wndrco, Unusual Ventures, and co-founders including Box co-founder Aaron Levie, Figma co-founder Dylan Field, and Okta Angel investors including founder Frederic Kerrest, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Eventbrite co-founders Julia and Kevin Hartz participated in the round. Socket CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh said that, together with the previous $4.6 million in seed round financing, Socket's total financing reached $24.6 million. The new financing will be used to expand the Socket team and support and integrate more programming languages. The company's clients include Brave, Figma, and Vercel (the co-founders of the latter two companies have invested in Socket). Aboukhadijeh expects the company to double in size, at least in terms of headcount, in the next few months if it maintains its current trajectory. The current focus is on growing Socket's engineering, security, operations, sales and marketing teams. Unlike traditional static analysis tools, Socket's open source code security vulnerability detection service provides actionable feedback on dependency risk rather than hundreds of meaningless alerts. Specifically, Socket looks for high-level red flags in software, such as malware, typos (registering often misspelled domain names for malicious purposes), misleading packages, and unmaintained code, as well as unknown maintainers and excessive permissions. The platform offers a search feature that allows users to drill down into the codebase to find and track changes to dependencies, as well as a free web browser extension that attempts to determine whether an open source package is safe and secure. In addition, Socket recently launched a ChatGPT connector that can summarize potential problems in software packages, and can identify "uncommon" code patterns in them. (TechCrunch)