This massively heightened interest in the topic from customers has, understandably, created a raft of new opportunities for companies with an idea related to cybersecurity. All of those keen customers have got investors interested and willing to fund differentiated vendors in the space — security funding is at an all-time high.
Riding this wave if AlienVault, which is today announcing a $52 million Series E funding round. AlienVault delivers a unified security platform that offers threat detection, incident response, and compliance management, all from one product. This integration of discrete security tasks is a smart move. As the velocity of cyberattacks increases, security professionals are looking for solutions that enable them to identify, resolve and audit security breaches quickly — an integrated solution will always be faster than a glued-together series of stand-alone tools.
Gartner predicts that global cybersecurity spending will reach $76.9 billion this year as organizations become more “threat-aware.” Problematically, however, many mid-market companies lack the IT budget and technical expertise needed to deploy numerous point security products and gather and analyze enough actionable information to stay ahead of threats. Hence, AlienVault's broad approach to the problem set.
Leading the round is a new investor, Institutional Venture Partners. IVP joins a plethora of previous investors, including Trident Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, GV Capital, Intel Capital, Sigma West, Adara Venture Partners, Top Tier Capital and Correlation Ventures. Interestingly, AlienVault recently appointed a CFO, Brian Robins, previously employed at CSC, Verisign and Neustar. The combination of the late-stage funding round and the CFO appointment suggests that this round may well be the last before an IPO. Total funding to date stands at $116 million. AlienVault claims to have over 2,000 enterprise and government customers.
It will be interesting to watch the next few months for AlienVault. It looks to be delivering a strong solution.