Staris

Staris, based in Seattle, was founded in 2023 by Adam Cecchetti and Austin Fath, former Carnegie Mellon classmates. Cecchetti previously founded Deja Vu Security, a Seattle application-security firm acquired by Accenture in 2019, giving the founding team direct prior exit experience in the same market. Staris describes its product as building “virtual security engineers” that continuously review and harden application code, positioning itself less as a PR-review bot and more as an automated, continuous alternative to traditional manual penetration testing. Its “Total Context Security” platform is built around three claims: findings come with working, exploit-proven proof (not just pattern matches), engineers get PR-ready patches they can ship same day, and the company issues signed monthly “Receipts” that can be shown to boards, auditors, or customers as assurance evidence.

The company raised a $5.7M seed round (reported by GeekWire in 2025) led by Freestyle VC, and had six employees at the time of that raise. Its site names three customers with executive testimonials: OpsHelm (CEO Bill Gambarella) and AMI Asset Track (CEO Tom Watson), plus Atlas Networks. Staris markets claims of “zero false positives,” a “40:1 efficiency” gain over traditional pentesting, and cutting noise by 99% before findings reach a security team — all vendor-stated figures without independent benchmarking found in available sources.

For a CISO evaluating application security spend, Staris’s pitch is replacing or supplementing episodic, expensive manual pentests with continuous, exploit-validated findings at a fraction of the cost (plans start at $4,900/year, scaling to $4,500+/month for validated tiers). The founders’ track record (a prior successful AppSec company exit) is a real positive signal, but the company remains very small (single-digit employees as of its most recent public funding news) with only a few named customers, so its claims of efficiency and accuracy gains have not yet been independently tested at scale.