WEB security company PortSwigger is celebrating being awarded a royal accolade.

PortSwigger Web Security, which is based in Knutsford, has been honoured with the Queen’s Award for Enterprise for International Trade.

The company is one of 201 organisations nationally to be recognised with the prestigious award, with the accolade acknowledging the company’s excellence in International Trade.

Portswigger is based in Victoria Court, employs 40 staff and was founded by its CEO, Dafydd Stuttard.

Dafydd said: “We are very proud of what we have achieved so far as a company.

“Starting out as a small one-person hobby project, we now employ a team of 40 people, and have continuing plans for recruitment across all areas of the business.

“Our expertise and innovative approach have resulted in us becoming a global leader in our market.

“That, coupled with high revenue growth over the last few years, mainly through international trade, makes being recognised for this prestigious award a real honour.”

Portswigger has been honoured with The Queen’s Award for International Trade for outstanding short-term growth in overseas sales in the past three years.

The Queen’s Award for Enterprise is the most prestigious business award in the UK, with winning businesses able to use the sought-after Queen’s Award for five years.

PortSwigger will celebrate its award at a royal reception for Queen’s Award winners at Buckingham Palace in the summer.

The company is a global leader in application security testing.

Its cutting-edge software is the most widely adopted in the web security testing market.

It is used by more than 15,000 customers in 130 countries, from small businesses to giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, to help them secure their web applications.

The company develops software testing tools which expose weaknesses in web applications.

Having started developing the software as a hobby, Dafydd wrote a book, The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook, which is still the go-to book for web security testers

More than 90 per cent of the company's sales are exports, and its overseas sales have grown by 127 per cent across the last three years. Its major markets are USA, Germany, India, Canada and Japan.

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CEO Dafydd Stuttard, fourth from left, front, with the PortSwigger team