Software development cybersec startup Nullify banks $1.1 million pre-Seed round

Cybersecurity startup Nullify, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help software developers and security teams detect and fix potential vulnerabilities in code as it’s being written, has raised $1.1 million in a pre-Seed round led by OIF Ventures. 

Former XM Cyber founding team Adi Ashkenazy and Zini Shahar, now running the security advisory firm Skylight Cyber, also backed Nullify alongside Blacknova Ventures and Cyrise, 

The initial capital will be used to scale Nullify, a cybersecurity bot that analyses the code within existing workflows to identify and fix any issues. It not only continuously detects, but also correlates and fixes security issues across a company’s supply chain, codebase and cloud environments.

Nullify is already being used by several companies here and overseas, with a public launch set for this week

Cofounders Shantanu Kulkarni, Tim Thacker and Tony Mao met while studying computer science and software engineering at the University of NSW.

Kulkarni, Nullify’s CEO, said they went on to work in cloud security roles at finance, insurance and tech companies where they sawn first hand the ongoing challenges around building secure software without slowing down the speed of development.

He went on to develop the industry engagement courseCOMP9447 with Thacker. It’s a collaboration between UNSW Computer Science and Engineering and Amazon Web Services (AWS) where students are mentored by AWS security engineers/solutions architects and build a cloud security project.

They founded Nullify with Mao in December last year. 

“With developers today pushing code twice as fast, security teams are struggling to secure software  at the pace it’s being built. Nullify is built for organisations to enable their developers, and not just  security teams, to own the security of the software they build,” Kulkarni said.

“By leveraging both open-source tools and generative AI, Nullify can detect, prioritise and  fix security vulnerabilities for developers, saving them hours each week on security work and allowing them to spend more time building software.” 

He’s now looking to expand the product suite with new technologies to meet the rapidly  evolving needs of the cyber-security market. 

OIF’s Andrew Yeo, said the coding cybersecurity startup is the first Australian company to join the AI developer tooling arms race.  

“Nullify’s core value lies in its ability to help businesses distribute security ownership across software development and security teams without compromising on the  speed of development,” he said.

“OIF is thrilled to support Shan, Tim and Tony in their vision to become the AI  security autopilot for all developer and security teams as software, AI and vulnerabilities proliferate globally.”

Skylight Cyber’s Adi Ashkenazy said embedding security testing into engineering processes has been costly and time-consuming, often at the expense of agility. Nullify provides a way to instantly enable  developer teams to own security at scale in a frictionless, consolidated and low-touch way.”

Kulkarni said that following the wider release of Nullify, they’ll be looking to raise a US seed Round and expand globally “to show that we can build world class cybersecurity and AI companies from here in Australia”.