ProjectDiscovery started the way a lot of great software does—trying to make our jobs easier. We were a group of security researchers and ethical hackers, and at the time, enterprise security software did only one thing really well: appease auditors. 

For the day-to-day work of actually identifying, finding, and fixing vulnerabilities, co-founder and CEO Rishiraj Sharma turned to open source, which led him to a GitHub repository and the rest of the co-founders. We were all feeling frustrated by the same challenges in our jobs. The tools we used: 

- Were too slow to innovate in response to new developments and threats
- Produced too many false positives, making it hard to prioritize vulnerabilities
- Weren't customizable to our organizations' architecture
- Tended to overstate the criticality of many vulnerabilities
- Made it hard to collaborate on remediation across teams and departments

After working together to create several open source solutions—all while only knowing each other by our GitHub usernames—we founded ProjectDiscovery. The goal was to make it easier for organizations to identify and fix vulnerabilities in their systems, as well as provide a platform for security researchers to share their knowledge and expertise. By pooling our collective experiences, we could innovate exponentially faster than proprietary vendors.

The project's community kept growing and we kept shipping, to the point where people assumed ProjectDiscovery was a real company. We were working on it in our free time, all while our user base grew and people were asking for new features. After raising a seed round, we went full time in January 2021, and have grown to a team of 35 people from over 10 countries.