Security
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Google’s BeyondCorp Enterprise security platform is now generally available
Google today announced that BeyondCorp Enterprise, the zero trust security platform modeled after how Google itself keeps its network safe without relying on a VPN, is now generally available. BeyondCorp Enterprise builds out Google’s existing BeyondCorp Remote Access offering with additional enterprise features. Google describes it as “a zero trust solution that enables secure access with integrated threat and data protection.”
Over the course of the last few years, Google — and especially its Cloud unit — has evangelized the zero trust model and built a large partner network around this idea. Those partners include the likes of Check Point, Citrix, CrowdStrike, Symantec and VMWare.
As part of BeyondCorp Enterprise, businesses get an end-to-end zero trust solution that includes everything from DDoS protection and phishing-resistant authentication, to the new security features in the Chrome browser and the core continuous authorization features that protect every interaction between users and resources protected by BeyondCorp.
“The rapid move to the cloud and remote work are creating dynamic work environments that promise to drive new levels of productivity and innovation. But they have also opened the door to a host of new security concerns and sparked a significant increase in cyberattacks,” said Fermin Serna, chief information security officer at Citrix. “To defend against them, enterprises must take an intelligent approach to workspace security that protects employees without getting in the way of their experience following the zero trust model.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Vdoo raises $25M more to develop its AI-based security for IoT and connected devices
It’s estimated that there were some 50 billion connected devices globally in 2020, and while that really says a lot about how far we’ve come in tech, for many it also speaks to a big issue: security vulnerabilities, with the devices themselves, plus all the components and services running on them, all potential targets for anything from malicious hackers to not-so-intentional data leaks.
Today, Israeli startup Vdoo — which has been developing AI-based services to detect and fix those kinds of vulnerabilities in IoT devices — is announcing $25 million in funding, money that it plans to use to help it better address the wider issue as it applies to all connected objects. With its initial focus on large industrial deployments, medical systems, communications infrastructure and automotive, Vdoo also is looking more deeply now at the wider network of devices that use communications chips, providing quick (as in minutes) assessments to identify and remediate or directly fix various issues: it cites zero-day vulnerabilities, CVEs, configuration and hardening issues, and standard incompliances among them.
The funding — an extension to the $32 million round that Vdoo announced in April 2019 — is coming from two investors, Israel’s Qumra Capital and Verizon Ventures (the investing arm of Verizon, which — by way of its acquisition of Aol many years ago — also owns TechCrunch).
Verizon’s interest in Vdoo is strategic and speaks to the opportunity in the market. As CEO Netanel Davidi (who co-founded the company with Uri Alter and Asaf Karas) describes it, operators like Verizon are interested because of their role as a distributer and reseller of hardware as part of their wider services play, be it for broadband access, or a telematics service or something for the connected home or connected office.
“They sell connected devices to enterprises and home users that are not made by them, yet the carriers are responsible for the security,” he said, “so the solution is to bake that into devices” to make it work more seamlessly, he said.
Verizon is not the startup’s only strategic backer. Others in the first tranche of this round included another carrier, Japan’s NTT Docomo, MS&AD Ventures (the venture arm of the global cyber insurance firm) and Dell Technology Capital, the VC arm of Dell.
The company has now raised around $70 million, and while it’s not disclosing valuation, Davidi confirmed that it has more than doubled this year.
(In April 2019, PitchBook estimated that it was just under $100 million, which would make it now at over $200 million if that figure is accurate.)
Davidi said that the decision to raise this money as an extension to the previous round rather than a new round was strategic: it gave the company the chance to raise funding more quickly, and to take more time to prepare for a bigger funding round in the near future.
And the reason for raising quickly was to address what was a quickly moving target: One of the by-products of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a dramatic shift to people working from home, buying new devices to enable that and in general using their communications networks much more heavily than before.
Connected-device security typically focuses on monitoring activity on the hardware, how data is moving in and out of it. Vdoo’s approach has been to build a platform that monitors the behavior of the devices themselves, using AI to compare that behavior to identify when something is not working as it should.
“For any kind of vulnerability, using deep binary analysis capabilities, we try to understand the broader idea, to figure out how a similar vulnerability can emerge,” is how Davidi described the process when we talked about the first part of this round back in 2019.
Vdoo generates specific “tailor-made on-device micro-agents” to continue the detection and repair process, which Davidi likens to a modern approach to some cancer care: preventive measures such as periodic monitoring checks, followed by a “tailored immunotherapy” based on prior analysis of DNA.
Vdoo is a play on the Hebrew word that sounds like “vee-doo” and means “making sure”, and points to the basic idea of how it approaches the verification around its device monitoring. It also feels somewhat like the next step in endpoint security, which was the focus of Davidi and Alter’s previous startup, Cyvera, which was eventually acquired by Palo Alto Networks.
The focus on devices, in some ways, is a significantly more complex approach, given that it’s not just about the device, but the many components that go into them. As we have seen with Meltdown and Spectre, vulnerabilities might exist at the processor level.
And as Davidi pointed out to me this week, at times those issues aren’t even intentional but still mean data can leak out, and at worst that can be exploitable by bad actors.
“Backdoors are being built into many devices, and some are not even intentional,” he said. “It may be that the developer wanted to create a shortcut to make something else easier in the future. Some will see that as a back door, and some will not.”
The fractal-like nature of the issue is what Vdoo is digging into with its widening approach.
“Initially we wanted to serve the ecosystem of manufacturers, since they are the cause of the problem and the origin of the security issues,” he said. “We started there with Fortune 500 customers in areas like automotive and industrial and medical and telco and aviation. The idea was to make a platform that could serve and protect security stakeholders. But then we saw that this was a big unserved market.”
Indeed, Vdoo quotes figures from research firm MarketsandMarkets that forecast that the global device security market will grow to $36.6 billion by 2025 from $12.5 billion in 2020.
“The number of connected IoT devices is rapidly growing, creating greater opportunities for security breaches,” said Boaz Dinte, managing partner of Qumra Capital, in a statement. “Vdoo’s unique device-centric, deep technology automated approach has already brought immediate value to vendors in a very short period of time. We believe the market opportunity is huge, and with newly infused growth capital, Vdoo is well-positioned to become the leading global player for securing connected devices.”
“With the expansion of 5G networks and mobile edge compute, there’s a need for an end-to-end, device-centric security approach to IoT,” added Verizon Ventures MD Tammy Mahn in a statement. “As the venture arm of a leading telco, Verizon Ventures is proud to invest in Vdoo and its world-class team on their journey to solve this global need, while ushering in a new era of security by design in our increasingly connected world.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Extra Crunch roundup: 2 VC surveys, Tesla’s melt up, The Roblox Gambit, more
This has been quite a week.
Instead of walking backward through the last few days of chaos and uncertainty, here are three good things that happened:
- Google employee Sara Robinson combined her interest in machine learning and baking to create AI-generated hybrid treats.
- A breakthrough could make water desalination 30%-40% more effective.
- Bianca Smith will become the first Black woman to coach a professional baseball team.
Despite many distractions in our first full week of the new year, we published a full slate of stories exploring different aspects of entrepreneurship, fundraising and investing.
We’ve already gotten feedback on this overview of subscription pricing models, and a look back at 2020 funding rounds and exits among Israel’s security startups was aimed at our new members who live and work there, along with international investors who are seeking new opportunities.
Plus, don’t miss our first investor surveys of 2021: one by Lucas Matney on social gaming, and another by Mike Butcher that gathered responses from Portugal-based investors on a wide variety of topics.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week. I hope we can all look forward to a nice, boring weekend with no breaking news alerts.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription
The Roblox Gambit
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
In February 2020, gaming platform Roblox was valued at $4 billion, but after announcing a $520 million Series H this week, it’s now worth $29.5 billion.
“Sure, you could argue that Roblox enjoyed an epic 2020, thanks in part to COVID-19,” writes Alex Wilhelm this morning. “That helped its valuation. But there’s a lot of space between $4 billion and $29.5 billion.”
Alex suggests that Roblox’s decision to delay its IPO and raise an enormous Series H was a grandmaster move that could influence how other unicorns will take themselves to market. “A big thanks to the gaming company for running this experiment for us.”
I asked him what inspired the headline; like most good ideas, it came to him while he was trying to get to sleep.
“I think that I had ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ somewhere in my head, so that formed the root of a little joke with myself. Roblox is making a strategic wager on method of going public. So, ‘gambit’ seems to fit!”
8 investors discuss social gaming’s biggest opportunities
Image Credits: Erik Von Weber (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
For our first investor survey of the year, Lucas Matney interviewed eight VCs who invest in massively multiplayer online games to discuss 2021 trends and opportunities:
- Hope Cochran, Madrona Venture Group
- Daniel Li, Madrona Venture Group
- Niko Bonatsos, General Catalyst
- Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Sakib Dadi, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Jacob Mullins, Shasta Ventures
- Alice Lloyd George, Rogue
- Gigi Levy-Weiss, NFX
Having moved far beyond shooters and sims, platforms like Twitch, Discord and Fortnite are “where culture is created,” said Daniel Li of Madrona.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses Twitch to explain policy positions, major musicians regularly perform in-game concerts on Fortnite and in-game purchases generated tens of billions last year.
“Gaming is a unique combination of science and art, left and right brain,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss of NFX. “It’s never just science (i.e., software and data), which is why many investors find it hard.”
How to convert customers with subscription pricing
Image Credits: C.J. Burton (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Startups that lack insight into their sales funnel have high churn, low conversion rates and an inability to adapt or leverage changes in customer behavior.
If you’re hoping to convert and retain customers, “reinforcing your value proposition should play a big part in every level of your customer funnel,” says Joe Procopio, founder of Teaching Startup.
What is up with Tesla’s value?
Image Credits: Bloomberg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Alex Wilhelm followed up his regular Friday column with another story that tries to find a well-grounded rationale for Tesla’s sky-high valuation of approximately $822 billion.
Meanwhile, GM just unveiled a new logo and tagline.
As ever, I learned something new while editing: A “melt up” occurs when investors start clamoring for a particular company because of acute FOMO (the fear of missing out).
Delivering 500,000 cars in 2020 was “impressive,” says Alex, who also acknowledged the company’s ability to turn GAAP profits, but “pride cometh before the fall, as does a melt up, I think.”
Note: This story has Alex’s original headline, but I told him I would replace the featured image with a photo of someone who had very “richest man in the world” face.
How Segment redesigned its core systems to solve an existential scaling crisis
Image Credits: piranka / Getty Images
On Tuesday, enterprise reporter Ron Miller covered a major engineering project at customer data platform Segment called “Centrifuge.”
“Its purpose was to move data through Segment’s data pipes to wherever customers needed it quickly and efficiently at the lowest operating cost,” but as Ron reports, it was also meant to solve “an existential crisis for the young business,” which needed a more resilient platform.
Dear Sophie: Banging my head against the wall understanding the US immigration system
Image Credits: Sophie Alcorn
Dear Sophie:
Now that the U.S. has a new president coming in whose policies are more welcoming to immigrants, I am considering coming to the U.S. to expand my company after COVID-19. However, I’m struggling with the morass of information online that has bits and pieces of visa types and processes.
Can you please share an overview of the U.S. immigration system and how it works so I can get the big picture and understand what I’m navigating?
— Resilient in Romania
The first “Dear Sophie” column of each month is available on TechCrunch without a paywall.
Revenue-based financing: The next step for private equity and early-stage investment
Image Credits: Hiraman (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
For founders who aren’t interested in angel investment or seeking validation from a VC, revenue-based investing is growing in popularity.
To gain a deeper understanding of the U.S. RBI landscape, we published an industry report on Wednesday that studied data from 134 companies, 57 funds and 32 investment firms before breaking out “specific verticals and business models … and the typical profile of companies that access this form of capital.”
Lisbon’s startup scene rises as Portugal gears up to be a European tech tiger
Image Credits: Westend61 (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
Mike Butcher continues his series of European investor surveys with his latest dispatch from Lisbon, where a nascent startup ecosystem may get a Brexit boost.
Here are the Portugal-based VCs he interviewed:
- Cristina Fonseca, partner, Indico Capital Partners
- Pedro Ribeiro Santos, partner, Armilar Venture Partners
- Tocha, partner, Olisipo Way
- Adão Oliveira, investment manager, Portugal Ventures
- Alexandre Barbosa, partner, Faber
- António Miguel, partner, Mustard Seed MAZE
- Jaime Parodi Bardón, partner, impACT NOW Capital
- Stephan Morais, partner, Indico Capital Partners
- Gavin Goldblatt, managing partner, Portugal Gateway
How late-stage edtech companies are thinking about tutoring marketplaces
Image Credits: John Lund (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
How do you scale online tutoring, particularly when demand exceeds the supply of human instructors?
This month, Chegg is replacing its seven-year-old marketplace that paired students with tutors with a live chatbot.
A spokesperson said the move will “dramatically differentiate our offerings from our competitors and better service students,” but Natasha Mascarenhas identified two challenges to edtech automation.
“A chatbot won’t work for a student with special needs or someone who needs to be handheld a bit more,” she says. “Second, speed tutoring can only work for a specific set of subjects.”
Decrypted: How bad was the US Capitol breach for cybersecurity?
Image Credits: Treedeo (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
While I watched insurrectionists invade and vandalize the U.S. Capitol on live TV, I noticed that staffers evacuated so quickly, some hadn’t had time to shut down their computers.
Looters even made off with a laptop from Senator Jeff Merkley’s office, but according to security reporter Zack Whittaker, the damages to infosec wasn’t as bad as it looked.
Even so, “the breach will likely present a major task for Congress’ IT departments, which will have to figure out what’s been stolen and what security risks could still pose a threat to the Capitol’s network.”
Extra Crunch’s top 10 stories of 2020
Image Credits: Catherine Falls Commercial (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
On New Year’s Eve, I made a list of the 10 “best” Extra Crunch stories from the previous 12 months.
My methodology was personal: From hundreds of posts, these were the 10 I found most useful, which is my key metric for business journalism.
Some readers are skeptical about paywalls, but without being boastful, Extra Crunch is a premium product, just like Netflix or Disney+. I know, we’re not as entertaining as a historical drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II or a space western about a bounty hunter. But, speaking as someone who’s worked at several startups, Extra Crunch stories contain actionable information you can use to build a company and/or look smart in meetings — and that’s worth something.
Powered by WPeMatico
RedHat is acquiring container security company StackRox
RedHat today announced that it’s acquiring container security startup StackRox . The companies did not share the purchase price.
RedHat, which is perhaps best known for its enterprise Linux products has been making the shift to the cloud in recent years. IBM purchased the company in 2018 for a hefty $34 billion and has been leveraging that acquisition as part of a shift to a hybrid cloud strategy under CEO Arvind Krishna.
The acquisition fits nicely with RedHat OpenShift, its container platform, but the company says it will continue to support StackRox usage on other platforms including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This approach is consistent with IBM’s strategy of supporting multicloud, hybrid environments.
In fact, Red Hat president and CEO Paul Cormier sees the two companies working together well. “Red Hat adds StackRox’s Kubernetes-native capabilities to OpenShift’s layered security approach, furthering our mission to bring product-ready open innovation to every organization across the open hybrid cloud across IT footprints,” he said in a statement.
CEO Kamal Shah, writing in a company blog post announcing the acquisition, explained that the company made a bet a couple of years ago on Kubernetes and it has paid off. “Over two and half years ago, we made a strategic decision to focus exclusively on Kubernetes and pivoted our entire product to be Kubernetes-native. While this seems obvious today; it wasn’t so then. Fast forward to 2020 and Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto operating system for cloud-native applications and hybrid cloud environments,” Shah wrote.
Shah sees the purchase as a way to expand the company and the road map more quickly using the resources of Red Hat (and IBM), a typical argument from CEOs of smaller acquired companies. But the trick is always finding a way to stay relevant inside such a large organization.
StackRox’s acquisition is part of some consolidation we have been seeing in the Kubernetes space in general and the security space more specifically. That includes Palo Alto Networks acquiring competitor TwistLock for $410 million in 2019. Another competitor, Aqua Security, which has raised $130 million, remains independent.
StackRox was founded in 2014 and raised over $65 million, according to Crunchbase data. Investors included Menlo Ventures, Redpoint and Sequoia Capital. The deal is expected to close this quarter subject to normal regulatory scrutiny.
Powered by WPeMatico
Lacework lands $525M investment as revenue grows 300%
As the pandemic took hold in 2020, companies accelerated their move to cloud services. Lacework, the cloud security startup, was in the right place at the right time as customers looked for ways to secure their cloud native workloads. The company reported that revenue grew 300% year over year for the second straight year.
It was rewarded for that kind of performance with a $525 million Series D today. It did not share an exact valuation, only saying that it exceeded $1 billion, which you would expect on such a hefty investment. Sutter Hill and Altimeter Capital led the round with help from D1 Capital Management, Coatue, Dragoneer Investment Group, Liberty Global Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Tiger Global Management. The company has now raised close to $600 million.
Lacework CEO Dan Hubbard says one of the reasons for such widespread interest from investors is the breadth of the company’s security solution. “We enable companies to build securely in the cloud, and we span across multiple different categories of markets, which enable the customers to do that,” he said.
He says that encompasses a range of services, including configuration and compliance, security for infrastructure as code, build time and runtime vulnerability scanning and runtime security for cloud native environments like Kubernetes and containers.
As the company has grown revenue, it has been adding employees quickly. It started the year with 92 employees and closed with more than 200, with plans to double that by the end of this year. As he looks at hiring, Hubbard is aware of the need to build a diverse organization, but acknowledges that tech in general hasn’t done a great job so far.
He says they are working with the various teams inside the company to try and change that, while also working to support outside organizations that are helping educate underrepresented groups to get the skills they need and then building from that. “If you can help solve the problem at an earlier stage, then I think you’ve got a bigger opportunity [to have a base of people to hire] there,” he said.
The company was originally nurtured inside Sutter Hill and is built on top of the Snowflake platform. It reports that $20 million of today’s total comes from Snowflake’s new venture arm, which is putting some money into an early partner.
“We were an alpha Snowflake customer, and they were an alpha customer of ours. Our platform is built on top of the Snowflake data cloud and their new venture arm has also joined the round with an investment to further strengthen the partnership there,” Hubbard said.
As for Sutter Hill, investor Mike Speiser sees Lacework as one of his firm’s critical investments. “[Much] like Snowflake at a similar point in its evolution, Lacework is growing revenue at over 300% per year making Lacework one of Sutter Hill Ventures’ most important and promising portfolio companies,” he said in a statement.
Powered by WPeMatico
2020 was a record year for Israel’s security startup ecosystem
From COVID-19’s curve to election polls, public temperature checks to stimulus checks, 2020 was dominated by numbers — the guiding compass of any self-respecting venture capital investor.
As a VC exclusively focused on investments in Israeli cybersecurity, the numbers that guide us have become some of the most interesting to watch over the course of the past year.
The start of a new year presents the perfect opportunity to reflect on the annual performance of Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem and prepare for what the next twelve months of innovation will bring. With the global cybersecurity market outperforming this year’s panic-stricken expectations, we carefully combed through the figures to see how Israel’s market, its strongest performer, compared — and predict what it has in store.
The cybersecurity market continues to draw the confidence of investors, who appear to recognize its heightened importance during times of crisis.
The “cyber nation” not only remained strong throughout the pandemic, but even saw a rise in fundraising, especially around application and cloud security, following the emergence of remote workflow security gaps brought on by social distancing. Encouraged by this, investors have demonstrated committed enthusiasm to its growth and M&A landscape.
Emboldened by the sector’s overall strength and new opportunities, today’s Israeli visionaries are developing stronger convictions to build larger companies; many of them, already successful entrepreneurs, are making their own bets in the industry as serial entrepreneurs and angel investors.
Image Credits: YL Ventures (opens in a new window)
The numbers also reveal how investors are increasingly concentrating their funds on larger seed rounds for serial entrepreneurs and the foremost industry trends. More than $2.75 billion was poured into the industry this year to back companies across all stages, a 97% increase from last year’s $1.39 billion. If its long-term slope is any indication, we can only expect it to continue to grow.
However, though they clearly indicate progress, the numbers still make the need for a demographic reset clear. Like the rest of the industry, Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem must adapt to the pace of change set out by this year’s social movements, and the time has long passed for true diversity and gender representation in cybersecurity leadership.
Seed rounds reveal fascinating shifts
As the market’s biggest leaders garner experience and expertise, the bar for entry to Israel’s cybersecurity startup ecosystem has gradually risen over the years. However, this did not appear to impact this year’s entrepreneurial breakthroughs. 58% of Israel’s newly founded cybersecurity companies received seed rounds this year, totaling 64 seeded companies in 2020 compared with last year’s 61. The total number of newly founded companies increased by 5%, reversing last year’s downward trend.
The amount invested at seed hit an all-time high as average deal size in 2020 increased by 11%, amounting to an average of $5.2 million per deal. This continues an upward trend in average seed rounds, which have surged over the last four years due to sizable year-on-year increases. It also provides further support for a shift toward higher caliber seed rounds with a strategically focused and “all-in” approach. In other words, founders that meet the new bar for entry are raising bigger rounds for more ambitious visions.
Image Credits: YL Ventures
Where is the money going?
2020 proved an exceptional year for application security and cloud security startups. Perhaps the runaway successes of Snyk and Checkmarx left strong impressions. This year saw an explosive 140% increase in application security company seed investments (such as Enso Security, build.security and CloudEssence), as well as a whopping 200% increase in cloud security seed investments (like Solvo and DoControl), from last year.
Powered by WPeMatico
T-Mobile says hackers accessed some customer call records in data breach
T-Mobile, the third largest cell carrier in the U.S. after completing its recent $26 billion merger with Sprint, ended 2020 by announcing its second data breach of the year.
The cell giant said in a notice buried on its website that it recently discovered unauthorized access to some customers’ account information, including the data that T-Mobile makes and collects on its customers in order to provide cell service.
From the notice: “Our cybersecurity team recently discovered and shut down malicious, unauthorized access to some information related to your T-Mobile account. We immediately started an investigation, with assistance from leading cybersecurity forensics experts, to determine what happened and what information was involved. We also immediately reported this matter to federal law enforcement and are now in the process of notifying impacted customers.”
Known as customer proprietary network information (CPNI), this data can include call records — such as when a call was made, for how long, the caller’s phone number and the destination phone numbers for each call, and other information that might be found on the customer’s bill.
But the company said that the hackers did not access names, home or email addresses, financial data, and account passwords (or PINs).
The notice didn’t say when T-Mobile detected the breach, only that it was now notifying affected customers.
A spokesperson for T-Mobile did not respond to requests for comment, but told one news site that the breach affects about 0.2% of all T-Mobile customers — or approximately 200,000 customers.
It’s the latest security incident to hit the cell giant in recent years.
In 2018, T-Mobile said as many as two million customers may have had their personal information scraped. A year later, the company confirmed hackers accessed records on another million prepaid customers. Just months into 2020, T-Mobile admitted a breach on its email systems that saw hackers access some T-Mobile employee email accounts, exposing some customer data.
Powered by WPeMatico
Perigee snares $1.5M seed to secure HVAC and other infrastructure
It’s been an eventful fall for Perigee CEO and founder Mollie Breen. The former NSA employee participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield in September, and she just closed her first seed round on Thanksgiving, giving her a $1.5 million runway to begin building the company.
Outsiders Fund led the round, with participation from Westport, Contour Venture Partners, BBG Ventures, Innospark Ventures and a couple of individual investors.
Perigee wants to secure areas of the company like HVAC systems or elevators that may interact with the company’s network, but which often fall outside the typical network security monitoring purview. Breen says the company’s value proposition is about bridging the gap between network security and operations security. She said this has been a security blind spot for companies, often caught between these two teams. Perigee provides a set of analytics that gives the security team visibility into this vulnerable area.
As Breen explained when we spoke in September around her Battlefield turn, the solution learns normal behavior from the operations systems as it interacts with the network, collecting data like which systems and individuals normally access it. It can then determine when something seems off and cut off an anomalous act, which may be indicative of hacker activity, before it reaches the network.
She says that as a female founder getting funding, she is acutely aware how rare that is, and part of the reason she wanted to publicize this funding round was to show other women who are thinking about starting a company that it’s possible, even if it remains difficult.
She plans to grow the company to about six people in the next 12 months, and Breen says that she thinks deeply about how to build a diverse organization. She says that starts with her investors, and includes considering diversity in terms of gender, race and age. She believes that it’s crucial to start with the earliest employees, and she actively recruits diverse candidates.
“I write a lot of cold emails, particularly around hiring and that’s partly because with job listings it’s all inbound and you can’t necessarily guarantee that that is going to be diverse. And so by writing cold emails and really following up with those people and having those conversations, I have found a way of actually making sure that I’m talking to people from different perspectives,” she said.
As she looks ahead to 2021, she’s thinking about the best approach to office versus remote and she says it will probably be mostly remote with some in-person. “I’m really balancing at this point in time, how do we really make the connections, and make them strong and genuine with a lot of trust and do that with balancing some elements of remote, knowing that is where the industry is going and if you’re going to be a company and in a post-2020 world, you probably need to adopt to some element of remote working,” she said.
Powered by WPeMatico
BigID keeps rolling with $70M Series D on $1B valuation
BigID has been on the investment fast track, raising $94 million over three rounds that started in January 2018. Today, that investment train kept rolling as the company announced a $70 million Series D on a valuation of $1 billion.
Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global co-led the round with participation Glynn Capital and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners and Boldstart Ventures. The company has raised almost $165 million in just over two years.
BigID is attracting this kind of investment by building a security and privacy platform. When I first spoke to CEO and co-founder Dimitri Sirota in 2018, he was developing a data discovery product aimed at helping companies coping with GDPR find the most sensitive data, but since then the startup has greatly expanded the vision and the mission.
“We started shifting I think when we spoke back in September from being this kind of best of breed data discovery privacy to being a platform anchored in data intelligence through our kind of unique approach to discovery and insight,” he said.
That includes the ability for BigID and third parties to build applications on top of the platform they have built, something that might have attracted investor Salesforce Ventures. Salesforce was the first cloud company to offer the ability for third parties to build applications on its platform and sell them in a marketplace. Sirota says that so far their marketplace includes just apps built by BigID, but the plan is to expand it to third-party developers in 2021.
While he wasn’t ready to talk about specific revenue growth, he said he expects a material uplift in revenue for this year, and he believes that his investors are looking at the vast market potential here.
He has 235 employees today with plans to boost it to 300 next year. While he stopped hiring for a time in Q2 this year as the pandemic took hold, he says that he never had to resort to layoffs. As he continues hiring in 2021, he is looking at diversity at all levels from the makeup of his board to the executive level to the general staff.
He says that the ability to use the early investments to expand internationally has given them the opportunity to build a more diverse workforce. “We have staff around the world and we did very early […] so we do have diversity within our broader company. But clearly not enough when it came to the board of directors and the executives. So we realized that, and we are trying to change that,” he said.
As for this round, Sirota says like his previous rounds in this cycle he wasn’t necessarily looking for additional money, but with the pandemic economy still precarious, he took it to keep building out the BigID platform. “We actually have not purposely gone out to raise money since our seed. Every round we’ve done has been preemptive. So it’s been fairly easy,” he told me. In fact, he reports that he now has five years of runway and a much more fully developed platform. He is aiming to accelerate sales and marketing in 2021.
The company’s previous rounds included a $14 million Series A in January 2018, a $30 million B in June that year and a $50 million C in September 2019.
Powered by WPeMatico
5 questions every IT team should be able to answer
Now more than ever, IT teams play a vital role in keeping their businesses running smoothly and securely. With all of the assets and data that are now broadly distributed, a CEO depends on their IT team to ensure employees remain connected and productive and that sensitive data remains protected.
CEOs often visualize and measure things in terms of dollars and cents, and in the face of continuing uncertainty, IT — along with most other parts of the business — is facing intense scrutiny and tightening of budgets. So, it is more important than ever to be able to demonstrate that they’ve made sound technology investments and have the agility needed to operate successfully in the face of continued uncertainty.
For a CEO to properly understand risk exposure and make the right investments, IT departments have to be able to confidently communicate what types of data are on any given device at any given time.
Here are five questions that IT teams should be ready to answer when their CEO comes calling:
What have we spent our money on?
Or, more specifically, exactly how many assets do we have? And, do we know where they are? While these seem like basic questions, they can be shockingly difficult to answer … much more difficult than people realize. The last several months in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak have been the proof point.
With the mass exodus of machines leaving the building and disconnecting from the corporate network, many IT leaders found themselves guessing just how many devices had been released into the wild and gone home with employees.
One CIO we spoke to estimated they had “somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 devices” that went home with employees, meaning there could have been up to 20,000 that were completely unaccounted for. The complexity was further compounded as old devices were pulled out of desk drawers and storage closets to get something into the hands of employees who were not equipped to work remotely. Companies had endpoints connecting to corporate network and systems that they hadn’t seen for years — meaning they were out-of-date from a security perspective as well.
This level of uncertainty is obviously unsustainable and introduces a tremendous amount of security risk. Every endpoint that goes unaccounted for not only means wasted spend but also increased vulnerability, greater potential for breach or compliance violation, and more. In order to mitigate these risks, there needs to be a permanent connection to every device that can tell you exactly how many assets you have deployed at any given time — whether they are in the building or out in the wild.
Are our devices and data protected?
Device and data security go hand in hand; without the ability to see every device that is deployed across an organization, it becomes next to impossible to know what data is living on those devices. When employees know they are leaving the building and going to be off network, they tend to engage in “data hoarding.”
Powered by WPeMatico