PortSwigger

PortSwigger is the company behind Burp Suite, the dominant toolkit for manual and automated web-application penetration testing, used by security researchers, bug-bounty hunters, and enterprise application-security teams to intercept, manipulate, and scan HTTP traffic for vulnerabilities. Burp Suite’s core proxy-and-repeater workflow has become close to a de facto standard for hands-on web application testing, complemented by an automated scanner, a community extension marketplace (the BApp Store), and Burp Suite Enterprise Edition for running scans at CI/CD scale across many applications.

Founded in 2008 by Dafydd Stuttard, who originally built Burp as a personal tool while working as a penetration-testing consultant, PortSwigger was bootstrapped and profitable for over 15 years before taking its first outside capital: a $112 million investment from Brighton Park Capital in 2024. The company reports more than 20,000 customer organizations across 170 countries, over 80,000 individual users, and more than 1,000 enterprise customers on its paid Enterprise edition, with headcount that has grown into the low hundreds at its Knutsford, UK headquarters.

Beyond the tooling business, PortSwigger operates the free Web Security Academy, a widely used vulnerability-research training resource, and maintains an active security research team whose published findings on new attack techniques and browser or HTTP quirks regularly influence how the broader application-security community tests for vulnerabilities — a research contribution that reinforces, rather than merely markets, its tooling.