Ossprey, a software supply chain security company helping organisations stop malicious code before it reaches production environments, has raised £2 million in pre-seed funding.
The London firm said this marks one of top three pre-seed investments in history for a UK cyber company.
The oversubscribed funding round was led by Episode 1 Ventures, with participation from Osney Capital and Octopus Ventures. It will accelerate product development, expand its engineering and commercial teams and support international growth.
“Software development has fundamentally changed. AI is enabling organisations to build software faster than ever before, but it’s also dramatically increasing the amount of code entering production and creating new opportunities for attackers to hide malicious software inside trusted open source packages,” said Nate Dunning, CEO of Ossprey.
“We founded Ossprey because existing approaches weren’t designed for the pace modern engineering teams now operate at. Organisations shouldn’t have to choose between shipping software quickly and building it securely.
“This investment allows us to continue developing technology that helps organisations build safely at AI speed while expanding our reach internationally.”
Ossprey was founded to address one of the fastest-growing risks facing modern software development. Today, around 90% of enterprise software is built using open-source components, while attackers are increasingly hiding malware inside trusted software packages, allowing malicious code to enter organisations through legitimate development workflows rather than traditional attack methods.
As AI coding assistants accelerate software development and vibe coding becomes increasingly common, the volume of code being produced is growing rapidly, making software supply chain security more critical than ever.
Ossprey continuously scans open-source packages for malicious code before they reach developers, helping organisations secure their software without slowing engineering teams.
Since raising the round, Ossprey has grown its team to seven, expanded its platform, launched continuous public scanning across major open-source ecosystems, and established itself as one of the fastest organisations globally to detect newly published malicious packages, frequently identifying threats far faster than the wider industry.
Ossprey is a graduate of Cyber Runway, the UK’s largest cyber accelerator programme, which is funded by the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT). Its founders, Nate Dunning and David Read, participated in the Launch and Grow programmes, hosted by Plexal, which supported them as they founded Ossprey.