Sqreen

Sqreen was founded in July 2015 in Paris, France by Pierre Betouin, Jean-Baptiste Aviat, and Fabrice de Gaudemar. Betouin and Aviat had both spent years on Apple's internal Red Team, where they attacked Apple's own products to find vulnerabilities; the tedium and manual nature of that work convinced them there should be an automated way to give any web application built-in runtime protection, rather than relying on perimeter firewalls or slow manual audits. The product they built injected a lightweight "microagent" into an application's runtime (initially for Ruby on Rails, later expanded to Node.js, PHP, Python, Java, Go, and .NET) to detect and block common attacks such as SQL injection, XSS, and account takeover with minimal performance overhead and no code rewrite.

Sqreen launched publicly via TechCrunch coverage in April 2016 and demoed at TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield later that year, raising a $2.3M seed round from Alven Capital, Point Nine Capital, Kima Ventures, 50 Partners and a group of French business angels (Marc Verstaen, Thibaud Elziere, Francis Nappez, Philippe Plichon, Justin Ziegler). The company went through Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch, by which point CEO Pierre Betouin had relocated to open a San Francisco office to pursue the U.S. enterprise market, while CTO Jean-Baptiste Aviat continued to lead engineering from Paris. In April 2019, Sqreen announced a $14 million Series A led by Greylock Partners, with participation from existing investors Alven and Point Nine plus Y Combinator, bringing total funding to roughly $16.3 million. By the time of its acquisition, Sqreen protected more than 800 organizations, including customers such as Algolia, Le Monde, FreeAgent, Front, Triplebyte, BlaBlaCar, Toptal, Mindbody, and Rainforest QA.

On February 12, 2021, cloud monitoring company Datadog announced it had agreed to acquire Sqreen, with the deal expected to close in Q2 2021; financial terms were not disclosed. Datadog framed the acquisition as a way to extend its observability platform into application security, combining Sqreen's RASP/WAF technology with Datadog's existing Cloud SIEM to give customers a unified, code-level view spanning performance monitoring, security monitoring, and in-app protection (an early building block of what Datadog would later brand Application Security Management / ASM). The acquisition closed in the following months (Datadog's own blog post on the integration is dated April 12, 2021, and CTO Jean-Baptiste Aviat's LinkedIn shows his transition to a Staff Engineer, APM & AppSec role at Datadog effective April 2021).

Business model

B2B SaaS

Subscription (tiered SaaS pricing with a free trial)