Odaily News: Open-source software security solution Socket announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing round, with a16z leading the investment. Other participating investors include Abstract Ventures, Wndrco, Unusual Ventures, as well as several angel investors including Box co-founder Aaron Levie, Figma co-founder Dylan Field, Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Eventbrite co-founders Julia and Kevin Hartz.



Socket CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh stated that with the previous $4.6 million seed round financing, Socket's total funding reached $24.6 million. The new funds will be used to expand the Socket team and support the integration of more programming languages.



The company's clients include Brave, Figma, and Vercel (the co-founders of the latter two companies have also invested in Socket). Aboukhadijeh expects that if the company maintains its current trajectory, its size will double within the next few months, especially in terms of the number of employees. The current focus is on developing Socket's engineering, security, operations, sales, and marketing teams.



Unlike traditional static analysis tools, Socket's open-source code security vulnerability detection service provides actionable feedback related to dependency risks instead of hundreds of meaningless alerts. Specifically, Socket looks for advanced warning signs in software, such as malware, spelling errors (misspelled domain names commonly used for malicious purposes), misleading packages and unmaintained code, as well as unknown maintainers and excessive permissions. The platform offers a search function that allows users to delve into code repositories and track changes in dependencies, as well as a free web browser extension that attempts to determine if an open-source package is secure and reliable.



In addition, Socket recently launched a ChatGPT connector that can summarize potential issues in software packages, identifying "uncommon" code patterns. (TechCrunch)