A bug in a payroll vendor’s code last year shut down part of the federal supply chain for a week. The fix took an hour; the damage took months. That asymmetry, small oversight, large blast radius, is why secure coding practices have moved from a developer-tools niche into a board-level spending category. The global application security testing market, which covers most of what’s commonly called “secure coding,” was valued at roughly $11.4 billion in 2024 and is projected to exceed $25 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research. The United States accounts for the largest single slice of that spend, and the mix of who buys it is changing fast.
What “secure coding practices” actually refers to
Secure coding is shorthand for a stack of software-development techniques and tools that aim to prevent vulnerabilities from being written into code in the first place. In practice, that means a combination of static application security testing (SAST), dynamic and interactive testing (DAST, IAST), software composition analysis (SCA) for open-source dependencies, secrets scanning, and increasingly AI-assisted code review.
The federal government’s own definition, codified in the NIST Secure Software Development Framework, treats secure coding as a lifecycle discipline rather than a single tool. That matters because procurement teams now ask vendors both “do you scan code?” and “how do you cover every stage from commit to production?” The answer usually involves three or four vendors stitched together.
Why the US is the biggest buyer
Two forces pull US spending above other regions. The first is regulation. Financial-services firms fall under federal frameworks that explicitly require secure software practices, and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s 2023 cybersecurity disclosure rule effectively forces public companies to treat software supply-chain risk as a reportable item. The second is the sheer density of US-based software vendors, Snyk, Veracode, Checkmarx, Semgrep, GitHub Advanced Security, GitLab Ultimate, all of which sell most of their revenue to US buyers.
Software supply-chain attacks have given buyers a reason to accelerate. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s secure-by-design initiative has pushed dozens of major software companies to publish secure development roadmaps, and federal agencies have started writing secure-software expectations directly into contracts.
The vendor landscape in 2025
The market has split into three tiers. At the top are the developer-platform incumbents, GitHub (owned by Microsoft) and GitLab, which bundle security scanning into their paid tiers and have won share by removing procurement friction. In the middle are the standalone security specialists: Snyk, Veracode, Checkmarx, and Synopsys (which acquired Black Duck and BlackMeta). At the bottom is a fast-moving set of open-source-first challengers like Semgrep and Aikido Security that compete on speed and developer ergonomics.
| Vendor tier | Representative players | Primary buyer |
|---|---|---|
| Developer platform | GitHub Advanced Security, GitLab Ultimate | Engineering leadership, bundled with dev tooling |
| Standalone specialists | Snyk, Veracode, Checkmarx, Synopsys | CISOs, AppSec programs |
| OSS-first challengers | Semgrep, Aikido, Mobb | Startups, mid-market with developer pull |
Source: Grand View Research and public S-1 filings; see the Grand View AppSec report.
The tier-2 standalone specialists are under the most pressure. They have to justify a separate procurement against a platform bundle, and most are responding by moving up the stack into runtime protection and compliance automation rather than competing on scanning alone.
Where venture investment is flowing
Venture capital in this space has concentrated on two theses: AI-first code review tools that promise to find more bugs than rule-based scanners, and “secure by default” developer platforms that make the safe option the easiest one. The shift echoes what happened in fintech a decade ago, when the winning products were the ones that replaced compliance friction with better UX, a dynamic covered in our reporting on how venture capital has shaped fintech growth.
Public-company security-software valuations softened through 2023 and 2024 but bottomed in early 2025, and private deal volume has returned. The clearest signal is that late-stage rounds are going to companies with proven enterprise ARR rather than developer-tool novelty, a sign that the buyer side is consolidating vendors rather than expanding them.
What this means for fintech operators
For US fintechs, who are disproportionate buyers of secure-coding tooling because they carry regulated data, the pressure is to simplify the stack without reducing coverage. A mid-sized fintech now typically runs four to six security tools across its pipeline; the winning procurement strategy in 2025 is to collapse that to two or three via a platform bundle plus one specialist, then use the savings to fund runtime and third-party-risk coverage.
The financial-services angle connects this market to a broader trend: banks and payment firms are increasingly responsible for the security of third-party code they embed, beyond their own. The shift toward embedded finance, where a non-bank platform carries banking logic, makes the software supply chain into a regulatory surface area that barely existed five years ago. That context is part of why fintech is becoming a strategic priority for financial institutions.
Three procurement patterns are emerging inside US financial firms as they rationalize this stack. The first is vendor consolidation around a single developer platform (GitHub or GitLab) for baseline coverage, paired with one specialist for high-fidelity scanning of the most sensitive repositories. The second is a shift from license-based pricing to outcome-based contracts, where the buyer pays per critical finding remediated rather than per developer seat, which changes the incentive structure for both sides. The third is a tighter feedback loop between AppSec and the engineering organization, with security findings routed directly into the same backlog tools developers use for feature work. The firms that have moved furthest on these three patterns report the lowest mean time to fix for critical vulnerabilities, and the data suggests that procurement structure matters more than tool selection in driving that outcome.
The longer arc
Secure coding has moved from a developer-productivity concern into one of the largest compliance and procurement categories inside every US financial firm. The market is still expanding, but the winning companies are the ones that reduce buyer complexity rather than add to it. For a wider view of how competitive dynamics in this category map to broader financial-services technology, our analysis of how fintech is reshaping competition in financial services sets the frame. The next two years will decide which of today’s tier-2 specialists survive the consolidation and which platform bundle captures the default-buyer position.
