Welcoming TopCoat to Snyk

We’re excited to announce that Snyk and TopCoat are joining forces.

TopCoat and its founders — Seth and Josh Rosen — are well established and respected in the data analytics space. They’ve built a powerful data analytics platform that simplifies building data applications through an integration with dbt, allowing data analysts and engineers to quickly create highly customized data reporting and visualizations. 

Similar to our early 2021 acquisition of Manifold, which has become the foundation for our platform APIs and Snyk Apps, the entire team at TopCoat will immediately join our platform engineering team to rapidly build the next evolution of Snyk’s reporting and visualization capabilities. The TopCoat product will power the analytical capabilities within the Snyk platform to enable developers as well as operations and security professionals to better respond to vulnerabilities.

We are incredibly excited for the future, and look forward to sharing more on this front later in 2022! In the meantime, please join me in giving our newest Snykers a warm welcome.

And with that, I'll hand the rest of this post off to TopCoat’s CEO, Seth Rosen.

TopCoat joins forces with Snyk: What’s next

I am thrilled to announce that TopCoat Data has been acquired by Snyk, the leader in developer security. Together with Snyk, we’re committed to enabling a world where the developers building our future also have the power to secure it.

As an additional element of the existing Snyk developer security platform, the TopCoat product will provide crucial core reporting and analytical capabilities. These powerful new analytical tools will enable developers as well as operations and security professionals to better understand — and ultimately take action on — their organization’s vulnerabilities.

Within the data ecosystem, TopCoat will shift from “vendor” to “contributor.” We owe a tremendous amount to the open source dbt community and we are excited to continue our mission of making analytical applications easier to build via OSS.  By joining Snyk, we’re doubling down on this original mission, while also continuing to collaborate with the community we care so deeply about.

When Josh and I began working on TopCoat in late 2020, we were in the midst of running a data analytics consultancy. We had become increasingly frustrated with traditional dashboard solutions which were mostly intended for internal analytics. We knew that building data products for an external audience required a higher bar for user experience, performance, and customization.

During our years of data analytics consulting, we had learned just how expensive building custom data apps can be, often requiring teams of software developers. While this is often the right approach for certain data products, modern tooling has enabled faster, cheaper, and more reliable solutions. We set out to create a completely new way to build analytical applications.  In the same way dbt turns analysts into analytics engineers, we designed TopCoat to give data professionals new superpowers previously only available to full stack software engineers.

Soon after building the first version of TopCoat, we made the decision to shut down our consultancy and fully focus on our new adventure. We were thrilled that Kennan, who had been leading so many of our client projects at the consultancy, decided to join us on the TopCoat journey.

It was around this same time that we met Shomik at Boldstart Ventures, who led our seed round and has also partnered with Snyk on their growth journey from the very beginning. There is truly no better “day 1” partner for enterprise technology startups!

With this new funding, we began building an amazing team around the world. Matt, Ezra, Shannon, Dave, Gaurav, Meg, and Mehakwill all now be joining us as an important part of the talented platform engineering team at Snyk.

For me personally, Snyk’s recognition of the need to invest in an analytical application platform is the primary reason this acquisition made so much sense for Josh and me at this time. We found our visions to be perfectly aligned, and this transition to Snyk marks an incredibly exciting new chapter for all of us.

As I mentioned, the applications that the TopCoat platform will power within Snyk will enable the world’s developers as well as operations and security professionals to leverage data to better secure their systems. Our team within Snyk will be expanding to also achieve our same original vision: making analytical applications easier and faster to build using the modern data stack.

To our investors, partners, and the data community — thank you. The best is yet to come!