Last week blockchain security startup Certik announced that it raised $88 million in a Series B3 funding round. The investment was led by Insight Partners, Tiger Global, and Advent International, with participation from Goldman Sachs.
This round of funding has brought Certik’s valuation to $2 billion, doubling the company’s value since its last round of funding in December.
Certik uses AI technology to monitor blockchain protocols and provides security audits for smart contracts. This year the firm also launched know your customer (KYC) and fraud investigation services.
With cryptocurrency losses to hacks and scams reaching $1.3 billion in 2021 and $1 billion in the first quarter of 2022, there is a growing demand for blockchain security services.
“Goldman Sachs is excited to be an investor in CertiK, a leading security platform for the blockchain and Web3 ecosystem,” said Oli Harris, head of North America digital assets at 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.”
Blockchain security has long been an important issue. In August 2019, a survey on the security of the Ethereum blockchain for use in decentralized applications (dApps) highlighted a range of security issues and vulnerabilities that security auditors look for . At the time, attacks on the ‘application layer’ where smart contracts and DApps are built had incurred over $370 million in losses.
Certik is not the only blockchain security firm providing smart contract audits. In 2019, Quantstamp secured investment from Nomura and announced its expansion into Japan. The firm uses an automated process alongside manual auditing to examine smart contracts for well-known issues. And last month, OpenZeppelin audited a smart contract created by Australia and New Zealand Banking (ANZ) for a stablecoin transaction.
