Security firm Veracode scored a $40 million boost in a late-stage funding round led by Wellington Management Co.

Founded in 2006, Veracode offers a cloud-based platform for application security. The money comes as the company prepares for an initial public offering that Veracode co-founder and CTO Chris Wysopal tells Dark Reading the company hopes will happen in the next 12 to 24 months.

"The funding will accelerate our ability to continue innovating (including via potential acquisitions) in key areas such as web application perimeter monitoring, mobile application security and reducing risk from third-party and open source components via our cloud-based service," Wysopal says in an email.

The investment comes at a time of acquisitions in the application security space. Earlier this year, application security rival Coverity was acquired by Synopsys, and Trustwave acquired Cenzic a few months ago as well. In 2012, Veracode acquired Marvin Mobile Security, a developer of a mobile app analysis service, to boost its own capabilities. 

The company has some very large competitors in the app security space, including Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Still, Veracode CFO Ed Goldfinger says in a statement that Veracode's subscription-based business model combined with its technology, service levels, and expertise in application security have enabled the company to succeed. According to the company, it secures hundreds of the world’s largest global enterprises, including three of the top four banks in the Fortune 100 and more than 25 of the world’s top 100 brands.

Veracode's core technology was developed at consulting firm @stake, which was acquired by Symantec in 2004. Two years later, the founders spun Veracode out of Symantec and went their own way. According to Veracode, the $40 million investment will also go towards aiding the company's expansion across the globe by increasing investments in sales and marketing. Last year, Veracode says it grew by 50 percent.

According to Fortune, this most recent round of funding brings the total amount the company has raised to $134 million.  

Bob Brennan, CEO of Veracode, said in a statement:

This investment accelerates our ability to help the world’s leading organizations systematically reduce cyber risk enterprise-wide. Our goal is to speed the pace of business innovation with a more scalable, next-generation approach that industrializes application security controls across our customers' web, mobile and third-party applications. This latest round of funding enables us to maintain our growth trajectory as we both gain new customers and expand our scope across our existing customers’ global application infrastructures.