StackHawk

In 2019, StackHawk's founders Joni Klippert, Scott Gerlach, and Ryan Severns recognized a critical gap in application security. Developers were struggling with security tools that created friction rather than protection - legacy DAST solutions caught vulnerabilities too late, SAST generated overwhelming alert fatigue, and security teams lacked visibility into their actual attack surface. They saw that the accelerating pace of software development was making this problem worse, with code being written faster than security teams could track it.

So they built StackHawk: an API-first Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) platform that shifts security left by integrating directly into CI/CD pipelines. Rather than treating security as a final gate, StackHawk combines runtime testing with code-based API discovery, automatically mapping the complete API attack surface and identifying vulnerabilities before production. The platform supports REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs, focusing on accuracy and developer adoption with minimal false positives. What started as a solution to help developers find and fix security bugs faster has evolved into an AppSec Intelligence Platform used by hundreds of companies - including Fortune 100 brands across airlines, healthcare, food & beverage, and insurance - to secure modern applications at the speed of modern development.