CertiK Closes $60 Million Funding Round from SoftBank Following $88M Series B3

CertiK – a Web 3 and blockchain security firm – has secured an additional $60 million investment from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tiger Global.

• This follows the firm’s $2 billion valuation last month, after an $88 million round in which Tiger Global also took part.
• With the new funding, investments in CertiK over the past nine months have surpassed $290 million.
• It also marks SoftBank’s first investment into the web 3 security space. The Japanese investment manager has previously put money towards crypto infrastructure provider BlockDaemon, and popular crypto exchange FTX.
• In a press release from CertiK, Softbank Managing Partner Dennis Chang claimed that security concerns are currently holding the Web 3 industry back from its full potential.
• “We believe CertiK combines deep expertise in cybersecurity, blockchains, and systems verification to provide companies with a leading solution in blockchain security and auditing,” he said.
• Indeed, while the decentralized web has attracted interest from major entrepreneurs, smart contract exploits and scams still plague the space.
• For example, Axie Infinity’s treasury was struck by a $600M Defi hack earlier this month due to a hacker compromising the wallet’s private keys. In early January, $3 Million were lost from an Algorand-based DEX after bugs in its smart contract were exploited.
• CertiK provides security products like code-auditing and Skynet, to locate smart contract bugs and provide all-day threat monitoring, respectively. It also launched a KYC and fraud detection service recently, to identify rug pulls and scams before they occur.
•  In 2021 alone, about $1.3B in crypto assets were lost to cybercriminals. The crypto industry is now putting major funds towards enhancing its security in light of such events.