Project Discovery

ProjectDiscovery is a cybersecurity company built around open-source security tooling, best known as the creator of the Nuclei vulnerability scanner and related tools such as subfinder, naabu and httpx. Its commercial products extend those tools into hosted platforms: the ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform, a fully managed SaaS bundle launched in 2023 covering asset management, vulnerability discovery and remediation as well as cloud security misconfigurations, and Neo, described as an AI security platform (also positioned as an AI security copilot) that continuously tests applications, APIs, code, cloud infrastructure and exposed assets.

The platform continuously maps an organization's external and internal exposure — domains, APIs, endpoints, ports and cloud services — and updates that map as infrastructure changes. Specialist agent workflows test applications, APIs, code and infrastructure in parallel, drawing context from code, tickets and prior findings, with a separate verifier agent reproducing and confirming exploitability before a finding is routed to engineering. The company also markets attack surface management, automations, and a memory capability under which dismissed false positives remain suppressed and new community-contributed detections flow into customer pipelines.

Founding story

The founders met through GitHub around the subfinder repository, where co-founder Rishiraj Sharma — a security engineer for seven years with a background in bug bounties, pentesting and application/product security — connected with contributors including Sandeep. The group began building attack surface management tooling as a side project, open-sourced an early component, and saw roughly 100 GitHub stars within a month and more than 10,000 within a year, which led them to turn the effort into a company and go full-time.

Business model

Open-source-led B2B SaaS: freely available scanning tools (Nuclei and related utilities) drive community adoption, with commercial hosted products — the ProjectDiscovery Cloud Platform and the Neo AI security platform — sold to enterprises with UI, integrations, reporting and support features.

Subscription-based enterprise SaaS built on top of the company's open-source tooling; the Cloud Platform was described at launch as the company's first commercial product.

Traction

The company reports a community of more than 100,000 security professionals, 900+ open-source contributors, 10,000+ Nuclei templates and over 2 billion monthly scans across the open-source ecosystem. At the time of the 2023 Series A its open-source projects had over 60,000 GitHub stars and 100,000+ weekly downloads, Nuclei ran more than 50 million scans per month across 100 countries, and over 3,000 organizations and engineers had joined the Cloud Platform beta. Named customers include Elastic, ConnectWise (20,000+ AWS instances) and Paddle.

Latest developments

The company's current positioning centers on Neo, an autonomous AI security platform for continuous testing of applications, APIs, code, cloud infrastructure and exposed assets, with published benchmarks on detection coverage speed relative to Tenable, Qualys and Rapid7 and published customer case studies with Elastic, ConnectWise and Paddle.