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When you run a bootstrapped application security training startup and have a few years of exceptional revenue growth, you capture the attention of some folks. And that's what recently happened to us. Here's the Security Journey story.
I always planned to sell Security Journey. The business was never a lifestyle for me; the goal was an acquisition. However, I didn't think it would happen this quickly.
We started in 2016, as I left the comfortable walls of Cisco and struck out on my own to change the world of application security, one developer at a time. Deb Romeo, my wife, and CFO joined along for the journey. From 2016 until the end of 2018, we did plenty of consulting, scrapping, and grinding. It wasn't easy, but it was worth it. Nothing of value is ever easy. We used the consulting income to fund the product and released version 1.0 of the Security Journey Platform.
As we grew from the two of us and added our first two employees, we transitioned from consulting to the product, and it all became about the product.
We haven't looked back since.
In 2019 we experienced lots of growth, and then 2020 began with a global pandemic. We had our dark month of April 2020, but things began to pick up. Deals started to close, and we continued to grow the team, adding content and marketing people. As the platform matured and content rolled out, we added to our engineering and sales teams, building a high-performing, lean startup that stayed true to our bootstrapped roots.
In January 2022, an acquirer came knocking. I have gotten many of these requests, ignoring them over the past few years. This one caught my attention because it was not a form letter. It specifically mentioned one of our competitors.
We took some meetings, negotiated, and ended up with an offer to sell Security Journey. It wasn't just any offer. It was an offer to meld together the two top security education platforms to form a super training company poised to dominate the industry.
We are happy to announce that HackEDU has acquired Security Journey.
Security Journey has the best application security catalog in the galaxy, while HackEDU invested heavily in the experimentation side of the developer experience. Melding content and experiments together result in a platform that contains the best of both approaches and provides an exceptional learning experience for our developers and product development adjacent people from companies large and small.
Our success is directly tied to the fact that we have opinions about application security. That won't change. I'll always be an application security practitioner first and whatever title I hold inside HackEDU second. The strength of our product comes from the fact that it's based on real-life. I've been in our customers' shoes – I know the struggles they face, and we built a product that truly solves their problems with application security education. Adding experiments together with our programmatic approach and content provides the best solution ever available in the industry.
As I sit back and reflect on our six-plus years of existence, I'm proud of what this team has accomplished. But this is just the beginning. Phase one is complete. Phase two is loading and is about to launch. The next part of our journey is integrating with HackEDU, and the best is yet to come!
Want to know more? Check out the press release and CEO Joe Ferrara's thoughts about the acquisition on the HackEDU website. Learn more!
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