Socket, a software supply chain security platform founded in 2020, has closed a $60m Series C funding round at a $1bn valuation, as enterprises race to secure the surge of open source code now entering production through AI-accelerated development.
The round was led by Thrive Capital, with participation from a16z, Abstract Ventures, and Capital One Ventures. The capital will support Socket’s next phase of growth as demand rises among organisations seeking to govern third-party code without disrupting engineering output.
The raise reflects growing urgency around software supply chain risk. The OWASP Top 10:2025 community survey ranked supply chain failures as the leading concern among security professionals, while a 2025 Linux Foundation report found that fewer than four in ten organisations assess the direct dependencies of open source components before incorporating them into their systems.
Socket’s platform works by analysing the behaviour of open source dependencies before they are introduced into a codebase, rather than relying solely on known vulnerability databases — which tend to flag threats only after public disclosure. The platform combines AI-assisted analysis with human verification, enabling security teams to detect malicious behaviour, prioritise exploitable vulnerabilities, and address dependency risk in real time — including novel attacks that have yet to be publicly documented.
The company counts Anthropic, xAI, Replit, Cursor, Figma, Vercel, Gusto, Mercado Libre, and Cribl among its customer base, alongside Fortune 100 companies operating in financial services and global media.
The scale of the threat Socket is designed to address was illustrated by a recent incident involving Axios, one of the most widely adopted packages in the JavaScript ecosystem. Socket detected the malicious dependency within six minutes of it appearing. Within a day, more than 2,000 organisations had joined its platform.
Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh said, “AI is changing how software gets built at every level. Teams are moving faster, more code is being generated, and more of what ends up in production now comes from outside the company. The hard part is keeping that speed without losing visibility into what’s actually getting shipped, and that’s where Socket comes in.”
Thrive Capital partner Philip Clark said, “Security is changing radically and rapidly. Legacy tools were designed to react to known vulnerabilities and assumed there was sufficient time to prevent a breach. Today, AI models can identify vulnerabilities so well and so quickly that this is no longer an option. We need tools like Socket that can identify threats in third party code before they enter production and we believe there is no team better positioned to meet that demand.”
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