Hack The Box secures $55M in Series B funding led by Carlyle

Minority growth investment in gamified cybersecurity online upskilling & talent assessment platform is set to reduce the severe global cybersecurity skills shortage and help organizations enhance their cyberattack readiness.

London, January 11, 2023: Hack The Box, a leading gamified continuous cybersecurity upskilling and talent assessment platform, today announces a Series B investment round of $55 million led by Carlyle, alongside Paladin Capital Group, Osage University Partners, Brighteye Ventures, Marathon Venture Capital and Endeavor Catalyst Fund. The new investment will accelerate Hack The Box’s growth trajectory with a focus on further building out its category-defining “gamer-first” solutions offering. Hack The Box will also enhance its go-to-market function, doubling down on the company’s ongoing international expansion with strong commercial traction in the US, Europe and APAC.

Hack The Box has continued to attract significant funding interest due to its highly engaging adversarial cyber up- and reskilling solutions that are powered by ultra-realistic coding gameplay and thereby effectively advance the security readiness of Hack The Box’s rising number of blue-chip enterprise and government customers. Chief Information Security Officers and other senior cybersecurity decision-makers increasingly turn to Hack The Box to assess how secure their organisations look like from an attacker’s perspective and address the weakest link in cyber – the human element – through a performance-driven and thus highly transparent evaluation of in-house and external cyber talent.  

Tripling in size over the last two years, Hack The Box has the largest global hacking community with more than 1.7 million platform members. With its thriving community being at the heart of the company, Hack The Box will continue to invest heavily in R&D. The company will execute against a product roadmap that entails top-notch content releases and groundbreaking features, making Hack The Box the ultimate reference point for cybersecurity professionals of all backgrounds, skill levels, and industries, allowing them to keep pace with the rapidly evolving cyber technology and threat landscape. 

Hack The Box offers a superior 360° platform that not only enables individuals, businesses, government institutions and universities to level up their offensive and defensive security skills, but also provides access to job opportunities in cybersecurity, thus addressing the industry’s serious talent shortage. Providing mind-triggering, hands-on, and highly entertaining learning content that mimics real-world threat scenarios and features the latest up-to-date attack techniques and methods, Hack The Box is setting new standards in cybersecurity expertise.

“Our mission is to create and connect cyber-ready humans and organizations through highly engaging hacking experiences that cultivate out-of-the-box thinking. The game in cyber has changed with defensive, reactive and recovery postures not being fit-for-purpose in the face of an ever-increasing and ever-evolving wave of sophisticated attacks. A new proactive offensive & defensive approach is needed to take the fight to cybercriminals rather than waiting to be hit. From individual security professionals to companies, this means adopting a ‘hacker mindset’, learning to think and act like an attacker. This is the kind of mindset that we cultivate through Hack The Box”, highlights Haris Pylarinos, Founder and CEO at Hack The Box. 

Constantin Boye, a Director at Carlyle, comments, “The demands on security and IT professionals have never been greater. An industry-wide talent shortage and an exponentially growing number of cyber threats place great importance on professionals and organizations to maintain best-in-class security practices. Hack The Box is a pioneer in constantly providing fresh and curated training and upskilling content, in a fully gamified and intuitive environment, enabling individuals and organizations to tackle real-world hacking problems. We are excited for the next stage of Hack The Box’s evolution and are proud to be part of this journey.”

Gibb Witham, Senior Vice President at Paladin Capital Group, adds, “With a vibrant community of 1.7 million registered security professionals and enthusiasts, Hack The Box is setting the bar for a new generation of product-led growth companies in the cybersecurity industry. We are thrilled to see Hack The Box becoming a vital partner for enterprises and governments in crafting security teams prepared for cyber attacks.”

This Series B funding takes Hack The Box’s total amount of capital raised to date to $70 million, fortifying the company’s position within the global cybersecurity ecosystem.