The term “black box” used to mean your code was airtight. Today? It’s a polite way of saying “I don’t know what the hell is going on in there.” That’s the mess modern DevOps teams are sitting in, an ever-expanding sprawl of tools, services, cloud infrastructure, and mystery workloads no one really owns. And into that chaos comes Crash Override, not with another dashboard to ignore, but with the world’s first Engineering Relationship Management platform, a full-spectrum visibility engine for code-to-cloud reality.
Founded in 2022 by two of security’s most seasoned war dogs, John Viega and Mark Curphey, Crash Override wasn’t born in a WeWork over LaCroix. It was built from scars. Viega wrote Building Secure Software before most engineers even knew what a buffer overflow was. Curphey? He founded OWASP when people still thought cross-site scripting was a typo. These two didn’t just see the DevSecOps visibility crisis coming, they built the floodgate before anyone noticed the water rising.
On July 15, they dropped the hammer: $28 million in seed funding, led by the heavyweights at GV (Google Ventures) and SYN Ventures, with backing from Blackstone Innovations Investments and Bessemer Venture Partners. New board seats? Claimed. Erik Nordlander from GV and Jay Leek from SYN have joined the mission, and when those two step in, you know it’s not for a hobby project. These are the folks who fund tectonic shifts.
This round pushes Crash Override’s total raise to $55.8 million, which isn’t a vanity metric, it’s a signal. Because when Fortune 50 are calling you a category creator, and Gabriel Lawrence, Toyota Motor North America’s VP of Information Security Cyber Protection is saying “for the first time, I can understand how applications flow from build systems into cloud environments in real time,” you’re not just building software, you’re building clarity into the bloodstream of global infrastructure.
Let’s talk tech. Crash Override’s build inspection engine doesn’t just watch the pipeline, it tags it, tracks it, and tells the whole story. From first commit to cloud deploy, every artifact gets marked, monitored, and mapped. Chalk, their open source provenance engine, tattoos the truth right into your codebase. And with Ocular, a modular scanner gifted from Blackstone’s own vault, they’re now decoding AI-generated code like it’s been leaving breadcrumbs.
