Probely is a Portuguese scale-up offering a web application and API vulnerability scanner to help developers and security teams identify and fix security issues in their applications. The company was among the first 48 companies to join the EIC Scaling Club as a part of the Digital Security & Trust group, aiming to boost its growth and market expansion. 

How did the scale-up come to be, what is the innovation behind its success, and what does the future hold for Probely?

From telco to scale-up

Founded in 2016, Probely equips security and software development teams with the tools to collaborate effectively and enhance the security posture of web applications and APIs. As the team puts it, the scale-up “knows that making your web applications and APIs secure can be frustrating”. Hence, Probely aims to make security accessible, scalable, and affordable.

The scale-up has six co-founders, all highly skilled and certified application security engineers and web professionals, who have been working together for 6+ years and have over a decade of experience in developing, auditing, and securing large-scale projects. The six spun off from an application security team of an international telecommunications provider. Having experienced the issues of scaling an app security team, they decided to build their own tool.

According to one of the co-founders and CEO Nuno Loureiro, there were no tools on the market back then built to be used by developers as they were all aimed at security professionals. Moreover, the available tools didn’t provide “good explanations about the vulnerabilities or how to fix them”. Inspired by their own challenges in application security, the six founded Probely to empower development teams by automating security testing.

The security of a hacker

As Probely explains, today, nearly any organisation’s portfolio of APIs and web apps grows fast, and keeping track of it is challenging. With Probely, organisations can quickly uncover and test all the unknowns for vulnerabilities. 

The scale-up’s API and Web Application Vulnerability Scanner can detect more than 30K potential security weaknesses and offer specific remediation guidance. Plus, the false-positive rate is as low as 0.1%. The automated testing solution can also be conveniently integrated into organisations’ existing software development processes, fostering a culture of shared responsibility for security across teams.

As the company’s CEO explains, Probely works much like a hacker. The solution doesn’t need access to code. Instead, it will just go to the website or the web application, test the application like a hacker would, and probe for vulnerabilities. Once Probely finds a problem, it provides a detailed report. This report explains the issue, its seriousness, and how to fix it. Probely even offers specific code examples for some technologies to help end-users make the necessary changes.

Thriving in a saturated market

In the summer of 2022, Probely secured a 7.7 million EUR Series A round, which enabled the company to strengthen the team and continue its international growth, mainly focusing on expansion in the U.S. And just about a week before writing this article, Probely announced that it has been acquired by Snyk, a Boston, MA-based company, specialising in developer security. As explained by the two parties, the acquisition “will support the real-world vulnerability insights of dynamic testing of APIs and applications in a way that allows developers to increase their productivity securely.”

From this perspective, Probely draws a picture of being a successful company, but it also faces challenges. The security market is not a quiet place. Hence, the competition requires offering a top-notch solution to the customers. 

As the CEO puts it, Probely stands out because of the carefully developed details and because it always keeps the needs of the developers in mind. One example is the API-first development approach, meaning that whenever the scale-up creates a new feature, it is added to the API and then to the interface, making it easier for the developers using the solution. 

Joining the EIC Scaling Club has provided Probely access to a vast network of investors, mentors, and industry experts. This strategic move has positioned the scale-up as a leading player in the cybersecurity industry, enabling it to scale its operations, expand its market reach, and ultimately deliver innovative solutions to a broader customer base.

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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