Rising Endpoint Security Star Cybereason Raises $200M, Eyes IPO

Cybereason plans to use proceeds from the SoftBank-led round to grow its presence in Europe, advance its vision around autonomous security, and put fuel behind its recent embrace of a channel-only sales model.

Cybereason has hauled in a massive Series E funding round to grow its global footprint in advance of an anticipated initial public offering.

The Boston-based next-generation endpoint security vendor plans to use proceeds from the $200 million round to grow its presence in Europe, advance its vision around autonomous security, and put fuel behind its recent embrace of a channel-only sales model, according to Cybereason co-founder and CEO Lior Div.

"We're going to disrupt the EPP [endpoint protection] market and build a new way to solve the problem for customers," Div told CRN. "In order to grow globally, you need a lot of money."

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Cybereason was founded in 2012, employs 500 people, and has raised roughly $400 million in five rounds of outside funding, according to Crunchbase. Japanese conglomerate SoftBank has been the lead investor in each of Cybereason's three most recent funding rounds, helping the company bring in $360 million of proceeds, Crunchbase said.

The latest SoftBank-led round will put Cybereason in a position to go public within two years assuming the market conditions are right, Div said. By then, Div said Cybereason should have much greater revenue, between double and triple the customers the company has today, and a more substantial presence in Europe and other geographies beyond the United States and Japan.

"The old guard of companies … are not providing what the market needs to win," Div said. "They [SoftBank] are counting on me to take the company every year to the next level."

Cybereason made a conscious decision almost a year ago to switch to a 100 percent indirect model, Div said, and since then has signed lead partners and a list of supporting partners in every major territory. The Series E funding should further Cybereason's push to create joint sales motions and marketing programs to accelerate growth with the channel, Div said.

From a technology standpoint, Div said Cybereason's endpoint protection platform already benefits from needing only one analyst for every 150,000 endpoints while many competitors require an analyst for every 20,000 endpoints. All of the detection work happens autonomously, Div said, with the analysts behind the scenes just monitoring to make sure everything is functioning as expected.

Going forward, Div said Cybereason will build a full stack offering that provides autonomous security on top of cloud, mobile, endpoint and servers. And Div said Cybereason's ability to save data almost forever will help prevent 'low and slow' attacks (which aim to stop a web service using extremely slow HTTP or TCP traffic).

Cybereason has grown its customer base by more than 300 percent over the past two years, Div said, and is today protecting many major banks, pharmaceutical companies, insurance vendors, and manufacturers.

The company's clients are often very large, Div said, with mid-size customers often having between 50,000 and 100,000 endpoints and Cybereason's largest customers having around 500,000 endpoints. All told, Cybereason said it has more than six million endpoints under protection.

Cybereason is winning over both legacy and next-generation endpoint security players thanks to superior technology and not having to rely on people behind the scenes to do the work. The company's technology has gotten smarter and smarter over the past seven years as it gets exposed to more and more attack data, which Div said has made it possible for the company as a whole to accelerate.

"The nice thing about the security market is that you cannot lie," Div said. "Either you can stop an attack, or you cannot."