Minority growth investment in gamified cybersecurity online upskilling & talent assessment platform is set to reduce the severe global cybersecurity skills shortage and help organizations enhance their cyberattack readiness
New York and London, January 11, 2023: Hack The Box, the leading gamified continuous cybersecurity upskilling and talent assessment platform, today announces a Series B investment round of $55 million led by Carlyle, alongside Paladin Capital Group, Osage University Partners, Marathon Venture Capital, Brighteye Ventures, and Endeavor Catalyst Fund. The new investment will accelerate Hack The Box’s growth trajectory with a focus on further building out its category-defining “gamer-first” solutions offering. Hack The Box will also enhance its go-to-market function, doubling down on the company’s ongoing international expansion with strong commercial traction in the US, Europe and APAC.
Hack The Box has continued to attract significant funding interest due to its highly engaging adversarial cyber up- and reskilling solutions that are powered by ultra-realistic coding gameplay and thereby effectively advance the security readiness of Hack The Box’s rising number of blue-chip enterprise and government customers. Chief Information Security Officers and other senior cybersecurity decision-makers increasingly turn to Hack The Box to assess how secure their organizations look like from an attacker’s perspective and address the weakest link in cyber – the human element – through a performance-driven and thus highly transparent evaluation of in-house and external cyber talent.
Tripling in size over the last two years, Hack The Box has the largest global hacking community with more than 1.7 million platform members. With its thriving community being at the heart of the company, Hack The Box will continue to invest heavily in R&D. The company will execute against a product roadmap that entails top-notch content releases and groundbreaking features, making Hack The Box the ultimate reference point for cybersecurity professionals of all backgrounds, skill levels, and industries, allowing them to keep pace with the rapidly evolving cyber technology and threat landscape.
Hack The Box offers a superior 360° platform that not only enables individuals, businesses, government institutions and universities to level up their offensive and defensive security skills, but also provides access to job opportunities in cybersecurity, thus addressing the industry’s serious talent shortage. Providing mind-triggering, hands-on, and highly entertaining learning content that mimics real-world threat scenarios and features the latest up-to-date attack techniques and methods, Hack The Box is setting new standards in cybersecurity expertise.
“Our mission is to create and connect cyber-ready humans and organizations through highly engaging hacking experiences that cultivate out-of-the-box thinking. The game in cyber has changed with defensive, reactive and recovery postures not being fit-for-purpose in the face of an ever-increasing and ever-evolving wave of sophisticated attacks. A new proactive offensive & defensive approach is needed to take the fight to cybercriminals rather than waiting to be hit. From individual security professionals to companies, this means adopting a ‘hacker mindset’, learning to think and act like an attacker. This is the kind of mindset that we cultivate through Hack The Box”, highlights Haris Pylarinos, Founder and CEO at Hack The Box.
Constantin Boye, a Director at Carlyle, comments, “The demands on security and IT professionals have never been greater. An industry-wide talent shortage and an exponentially growing number of cyber threats place great importance on professionals and organizations to maintain best-in-class security practices. Hack The Box is a pioneer in constantly providing fresh and curated training and upskilling content, in a fully gamified and intuitive environment, enabling individuals and organizations to tackle real-world hacking problems. We are excited for the next stage of Hack The Box’s evolution and are proud to be part of this journey.”
Gibb Witham, Senior Vice President at Paladin Capital Group, adds, “With a vibrant community of 1.7 million registered security professionals and enthusiasts, Hack The Box is setting the bar for a new generation of product-led growth companies in the cybersecurity industry. We are thrilled to see Hack The Box becoming a vital partner for enterprises and governments in crafting security teams prepared for cyber attacks.”
This Series B funding takes Hack The Box’s total amount of capital raised to date to $70 million, fortifying the company’s position within the global cybersecurity ecosystem.
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About Hack The Box:
Hack The Box is a leading online gamified cybersecurity upskilling and talent assessment platform that allows individuals, businesses, government organizations and universities to level up their offensive and defensive security skills. Since launching in 2017, Hack The Box has brought together a global community of more than 1.7 million platform members, and has built a portfolio of more than 1,500 enterprise, government and university customers that utilize Hack The Box’s hands-on, self-paced, and gamified learning environment to take their cybersecurity skills to the next level. Our mission is to create and connect cyber-ready humans and organizations through highly engaging hacking experiences that cultivate out-of-the-box thinking. With constantly updated virtual labs, real-world scenarios simulation, CTF-style challenges, and multiplayer hacking games, Hack The Box is the reference point for all cybersecurity professionals. With a rapidly expanding footprint across the globe, Hack The Box’s headquarters are located in the UK with additional offices in Greece and the US.
For more information, please visit hackthebox.com
Media PoC: Sofia Vourlaki, Marketing Communications Manager at Hack The Box, ophie@hackthebox.com
About Carlyle:
Carlyle (NASDAQ: CG) is a global investment firm with deep industry expertise that deploys private capital across three business segments: Global Private Equity, Global Credit and Global Investment Solutions. With $369 billion of assets under management as of September 30, 2022, Carlyle’s purpose is to invest wisely and create value on behalf of its investors, portfolio companies and the communities in which we live and invest. Carlyle employs more than 2,100 people in 29 offices across five continents.
Further information is available at carlyle.com
Media PoC:
Nicholas Brown
nicholas.brown@carlyle.com
+44 7471 037 002
About Paladin Capital Group:
Paladin Capital Group was founded in 2001 and has offices in Washington DC, New York, London, Luxembourg, and Silicon Valley. As a multi-stage investor, Paladin’s core strength is identifying, supporting and investing in innovative companies that develop promising, early-stage technologies to address the critical cyber and advanced technological needs of both commercial and government customers. Combining proven investment experience with deep expertise in global security, cyber technology and cutting-edge research, Paladin has invested in more than 60 companies since 2008 and has been a trusted partner to investors, entrepreneurs and governments for over two decades.
For more on Paladin Capital Group visit us at PaladinCapGroup.com
About OUP:
OUP (Osage University Partners) is a venture capital firm focused on investing in startups that are commercializing pioneering university technologies. OUP partners with top research universities to invest in their most innovative startups, and OUP shares its investment profit with its partner institutions. The firm invests in software, hardware, climate tech, and life science companies at all stages of company development. Since 2009, OUP has partnered with over 100 universities, including 27 of the top 30 U.S. institutions by research expenditures, and has invested in over 130 of their spinouts.
For more information, visit oup.vc
About Marathon Venture Capital:
Marathon Venture Capital is a seed-stage venture capital fund, helping ambitious Greek founders build world-class technology companies. With about $100m under management, Marathon has provided the first check in category leading companies, such as Netdata, Lenses.io, Causaly, and Hack The Box.
About Brighteye Ventures:
Brighteye Ventures is a leading European Edtech venture capital fund. Leveraging deep experience and relationships in tech, education, media, and VC. Looks for exciting startups at the intersection of learning, entertainment and creativity to empower and expand the frontiers of human potential. Investing at Seed and Series A stages, we help portfolio companies refine product, build partnerships and scale across geographies. Brighteye are looking for entrepreneurs that use technology and industry knowledge to build competitive businesses that can become global leaders.
About Endeavor Catalyst Fund:
Endeavor is the leading global community of, by, and for High-Impact Entrepreneurs — those who dream bigger, scale faster, and pay it forward. Driven by our belief that High-Impact Entrepreneurs transform economies, Endeavor is on a mission to build thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging and underserved markets around the world.
Endeavor creates a Multiplier Effect by inspiring high-growth founders to dream bigger, supporting and investing in them to scale faster, and providing a platform to pay it forward — thereby compounding their individual impact.
To sustain Endeavor’s long-term operations in a mission-aligned way, Endeavor created Endeavor Catalyst — a rules-based, co-investment fund, set up to invest in the same High-Impact Entrepreneurs that Endeavor supports. Today, Endeavor Catalyst is among the world’s top early-stage funders of startups-turned $1B+ companies (“Unicorns”) outside of the U.S. and China.