Smart Contracts Security Firm Certora Pulls $36m in Series B Funding

Certora, a security tech startup that helps Decentralized Finance (DeFi) based smart contracts identify bugs in their codes before they are deployed has raised the sum of $36 million from investors.

According to a tweet from the startup, the funding round was led by Jump Crypto, and also enjoined participation from Tiger Global, Galaxy Digital, Electric Capital, ACapital, Framework Ventures, CoinFund, Lemniscap, Coinbase (COIN), and VMware (VMW).

Certora plays a vital role in Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible protocols and counts the likes of Aave, SushiSwap, Compound, and Balancer as clients. The startup has developed a ‘Prover’ technology that scans codes and either passes them as clear or not based on its assessment of any smart contracts rules violations. 

Thus far this year, there has been quite a lot of smart contract exploitation that has resulted in a record-breaking fund drain. The latest is the $625 million hack of Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge, an exploit that has reduced the overall functionalities of the popular blockchain Play-2-Earn (P2E) game.

If not for Certora, SushiSwap might have suffered an exploit with its Trident liquidity pool contract. Certora detected a bug that would have permitted a hacker to drain the pool of its funds, and the bug was fixed before the product was officially launched.

With the injected capital, the startup hopes to expand its reach to other blockchain networks starting with Solana and then Polkadot. 

“Powered by world-class experts, Certora leverages formal verification to employ a suite of scalable and robust products that offer much higher reusability and granular testing,” said Jump Crypto partner and investments head Saurabh Sharma in a statement.

Based on the pivotal position they occupy, security startups have been getting notable attention from Venture Capital (VCs) in recent times. CertiK pulled $88 million in new stock offering as reported by Blockchain.News back in April with backing from Goldman Sachs.

Image source: CryptoShrypto