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About Sherlock
Sherlock is a smart contract security platform that combines audits, bug bounties, and insurance. Its core business covers the full lifecycle: AI-assisted code analysis during development, collaborative audits and audit contests before launch, and post-launch bug bounty programs with optional financial coverage (up to $500,000).
The key differentiator is that Sherlock backs its audit work with insurance. If a vulnerability is missed and causes financial loss, Sherlock pays out. This aligns incentives and makes auditors accountable, unlike traditional point-in-time audits where the auditor bears no responsibility for missed issues.
The market pain point is that conventional audits are snapshots—code changes after launch, and new vulnerabilities emerge. Sherlock addresses this by turning security into a continuous process, with bug bounties monitoring live code and findings feeding back into development.
In the past six months (March–September 2026), Sherlock publicly launched Audit Engine, an AI-native audit orchestration platform that coordinates multiple frontier AI models and human researchers in one engagement. It was validated on Polygon's Heimdall V2, where over 200 participants contributed, and results showed different systems excel at different parts of the attack surface—no single approach catches everything. The engine deduplicates and validates findings through proprietary AI judging, delivering a consolidated report plus benchmarking metrics. Sherlock has worked with major protocols including the Ethereum Foundation, Aave, Morpho, and the Cosmos ecosystem.
Sherlock launched its AI-native security audit engine Audit Engine, advancing automated smart contract analysis with long-term implications for audit scalability and precision.
It then introduced a $16 million bug bounty program with Usual, establishing a major incentive framework to enhance protocol security standards.
Key progress for Sherlock in the past six months includes: launching Audit Engine, which integrates frontier LLMs, purpose-built AI auditors, and AI-enhanced researchers to deliver unified audit results; releasing Sherlock AI v2.2 with Solana Rust support and a planner-specialist architecture covering seven vulnerability categories, while incorporating repository context and documentation; completing over 200 security engagements in H1, making it one of Web3's fastest-growing security firms.
Future focus: v2.3 will strengthen assumption controls, allowing teams to directly correct assumptions; and build execution-context reviews that include external dependency analysis. The roadmap also includes expanding multi-language support and integrating dynamic techniques such as fuzzing and symbolic execution.
Jack Sanford: Co-founder & CEO. Graduated from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business; worked as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley and a global equities associate at Citadel, managing a $300M portfolio. Founded Sherlock in 2021, leading AI-plus-human smart contract audits, audit contests, bug bounties, and full-lifecycle security services; over $150B secured.
Evert Kors: Co-founder & CTO. Graduated from Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences with a bachelor's in Technical Informatics/Computer Engineering. Co-founded an AI startup in 2017 focused on ML-trained personal assistants; later moved into Web3 security. At Sherlock, leads technology, driving AI-native security review, collaborative private audits, and audit contests.