Codean, a Utrecht-based cybersecurity startup, announced on Friday that it has secured a €400K subsidy from the REACT program to develop its toolbox, which lets ethical hackers review code faster.
The announcement comes four months after raising €1M from TIIN Capital and five angel investors to accelerate product development.
Arthur Tolsma, Codean co-founder and CEO, says, “Our previous investment of €1M allowed us to hire top quality people, and we have grown from 4 to a team of 11. Our review environment already helps security experts work faster, but that can and should be improved because criminal hackers also work smarter. This requires complex technology, which is important to this subsidy.”
What does Codean solve?
Criminal hackers are constantly adapting and finding new ways to stay ahead of the curve, which unfortunately means the need for cybersecurity experts is also growing.
With the economy taking a step back, this can be difficult for many businesses and organisations. However, criminal hackers aren’t slowing down, so it’s crucial to be proactive to protect businesses and their data.
Tolsma says, “The digitisation trend results in increasing opportunities for digital criminals. Certainly, software is becoming increasingly complex, and writing good software is completely different from writing secure software”.
Here’s where Codean filled this gap by developing a unique toolbox.
Codean: What you need to know
Founded in 2020 by Kevin Valk and Arthur Tolsma, Codean built a review environment that makes security experts work twice as fast and up to ten times for specific tasks. Further, it automates mundane analysis tasks, so security experts can focus on finding vulnerabilities.
The review environment also helps security analysts to codify their knowledge.
With a codemark, a developer can highlight code as ‘interesting’ from a security perspective. The developer will then have to describe what that code does and link it to other codemarks to mark a vulnerable path through the codebase.
And that is the purpose of a security expert: find a path through which a criminal hacker can get in and find something valuable. With this knowledge, the software developer can make his code more secure.
Since the review environment is based out of the cloud, security experts can easily collaborate on a codebase and review each other’s work.
The startup is working with 11 employees on its mission to make the digital world safer.
Codean says it does not believe in fully automated tools for software developers because they show a lot of false positives and miss essential vulnerabilities. Instead, they view the human security expert as the future, but the expert could use a hand.
The Dutch company provides the review environment to security experts worldwide and software security advice to software developers with their team of security analysts.
REACT EU
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU has decided to set up a recovery program. Part of this is the REACT EU (Recovery assistance for cohesion and the territories of Europe) program, which focuses on a regional economy’s green, digital and resilient recovery.
The Dutch organisation ‘Kansen voor West’ is the implementing body that has granted this subsidy to Codean through this ERDF programme.
REACT-EU is not a new funding source but a top-up to 2014-2020 European Regional Development Fund and European Social Fund allocations, clarifies European Commission.