Vendor Analysis
published on Nov 17, 2020
Report Overview:
This NelsonHall assessment analyzes Cobalt.io 's offerings and capabilities in Crowdtesting
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall's crowdtesting profile on Cobalt.io’ is a comprehensive assessment of Cobalt’s offerings and capabilities, designed for:
- Sourcing managers monitoring the capabilities of existing suppliers of application services, quality assurance/testing services and crowdtesting and identifying vendor suitability for RFPs
- Vendor marketing, sales, and business managers looking to benchmark themselves against their peers
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in the IT services sector.
Scope of this Report:
The report provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of Cobalt.io’’s crowdtesting service offerings and capabilities, and market and financial strengths, including:
- Identification of the company’s strategy, emphasis, and new developments
- Analysis of the company’s strengths, weaknesses, and outlook
- Revenue estimates
- Analysis of the profile of the company’s customer base including the company’s targeting strategy and examples of current contracts
- Analysis of the company’s offerings and key service components
- Analysis of the company’s delivery organization including the location of delivery locations.
Key Findings & Highlights:
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes Cobalt.io’s offerings and capabilities in crowdtesting.
Cobalt.io was founded in 2013 by four Danish engineers. Initially known as Crowdcurity, the company first delivered penetration crowdtesting (pen testing). It now markets its services under Pentest as a Service (PTaaS).
The company is privately held and has received two rounds of funding for ~$37m. A recent round is its $29m Series B round, led by Highland Europe, in August 2020.
It has a headcount of 120. It is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston and Berlin. With the COVID-19 pandemic, Cobalt.io has adopted remote working with employees located across the globe.
Cobalt.io markets its services under Pentest as a service and considers it differentiates from security crowdtesting vendors in three ways:
- It relies on a community of skilled pen testers. The pen tester community has a size of 300
- It promotes collaboration between community members rather than competition/gamification (in comparison with a bug bounty model)
- It provides its results through both dynamic reports and integration with JIRA, GitHub, and ITSM tools. Cobalt.io highlights the integration with such tools accelerates the remediation and re-testing of security flaws. It also allows for direct collaboration between clients and pen-testers.