As Poslovni Dnevnik/Lucija Spiljak writes, this is the latest exit of a Croatian company specialising in application security. As its founder Leon Juranic pointed out, he founded the company back in 2010 “with one laptop and a lot of knowledge and will”. He has since developed the Croatian DefenseCode ThunderScan and DefenseCode WebStrike solutions that the company sells abroad, mostly in the United States.
“After they contacted me, I can say that I was pleasantly surprised,” said Leon Juranic, a hacker and information systems security expert. ThunderScan, for which they are best known, is a software solution for the security analysis of application source code that supports 30 programming languages and a number of development tools and environments. WebStrike is a software solution for security testing of websites.
Today, these products are also used by global Fortune 500 companies. the Croatian DefenseCode opened a subsidiary over in Ireland back in 2017, and two years later in the United States.
The team previously consisted of seven people, six of whom are moving to the Israeli WhiteSource company and will be working remotely, so there will be no need to relocate any of them. It will integrate its ThunderScan SAST for application security analysis with WhiteSource’s security solution.
“The key people of the Croatian DefenseCode team joined WhiteSource after the acquisition and will continue to develop state-of-the-art security solutions, only now with the well-coordinated and large machinery provided by such a world-renowned and renowned company as WhiteSource. DefenseCode has always strived to produce the best solution for security analysis of application source code, a solution that provides accurate, relevant and usable results, without unnecessary and with very few false positive warnings. It’s a solution that is not only fast but also very easy to use. We’re looking forward to working together in the WhiteSource family on a new generation of innovative SAST solutions that will, I’m sure, leave their mark in the time to come,” said Juranic.
He thanked his wife Tanja and his parents who gave him the share capital to open the company 12 years ago, as well as investors and others who are part of the story. The initial investor in the Croatian DefenseCode was Vlatko Kosturjak, and then, back in 2015, also as an investor, they were joined by IT security expert Lucijan Caric.
“I can’t say that I’ve got something strictly planned for the future at this moment in time. For some time now, my friend Boris Debic, an IT expert who has built a career at Google, and I have been considering establishing an institution to deal with extremely complex situations that occur mainly in management, decision-making processes and security affairs. In addition, I thought about trying to solve the problem of practically automated privacy violations on the Internet and the incredibly widespread (mis) use of user data,” announced Caric.
Although the amount of the acquisition and negotiations remain a secret for now, they were, he says, long and complex, and the consulting team was led by Mate Lovric.
Caric added that he is glad to have quickly recognised Leon’s talent, knowledge and product potential all that time ago, but also his keen ability to “organise a great team in limited and not always simple conditions and create a respectable software solution that was eventually recognised by one of the leading companies in the industry.”
“I hope that there will be talks about what the investment scene looks like, mostly here in Croatia and in the European Union, especially in the field of information security and key technologies for the protection of information systems. But now is the time to congratulate Leon and the team he led,” he concluded.
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