Developer security is booming as hack-prevention starts earlier than ever: Here are the 25 startups you need to know in this red-hot space

Snyk; Uptycs; Stackhawk; ShiftLeft; Yuqing Liu/Business Insider

• Developer security is one of the fastest-growing segments of the booming cybersecurity industry, according to the analysis firm PitchBook.
• The sector is pushed by the hot trend of "shift left," which moves security earlier in the development process.
• Startups are driving the shift left trend, from $2.6 billion Snyk to newer startups Apiiro and StackHawk.
• Here are the top startups in this sector with valuations above $20 million, according to Pitchbook, and two newer startups curated by Business Insider.

One of the hottest segments in the booming cybersecurity industry is developer security, which focuses on helping engineers build safer software and applications from the very beginning, with the goal of preventing would-be hacks from ever taking place.

Its rise is part of cybersecurity's mantra of "shift left," which is industry slang for moving security earlier in the process of developing software and mobile applications. Companies are now beefing up application security in the beginning of development— by using artificial intelligence to check security code or pulling from libraries of "clean" code — rather than tacking it on at the end.

This delights some longtime cybersecurity experts: "I have spent 35 years trying to get at the root cause of cybersecurity issues," Ted Schlein, the longtime cybersecurity investor and general partner at Kleiner Perkins told Business Insider in a recent interview.

The good news for Schlein and other experts is that developer security is being driven by startups, from $2.6 billion Snyk to newer firms like Apiiro and StackHawk.

PitchBook pegs application security – which developer security, or DevOps, falls under – as a $4.7 billion market as of 2020, with double-digit growth next year ultimately leading to a $7 billion market by 2023.

"DevOps security tools are gaining traction because organizational culture shifts have led developers to become central to the security buying process," says Brendan Burke, an emerging technology analyst at PitchBook. "Leading cybersecurity VC investors have achieved a first wave of exits benefiting from this cultural shift and are doubling down on the niche."

DevOps companies Splunk, New Relic, PagerDuty, and most recently JFrog have all gone public in recent years, and all have DevOps security-related offerings.

Here are 23 startups that PitchBook lists in the DevOpps security space with a valuation of at least $20 million, as well as two other startups in the space curated by Business Insider (all financial and company data via PitchBook unless otherwise stated):