Cyber Unicorn Cybereason Changes CEOs Along With $100M Raise

There seems to be a lot going on at cybersecurity unicorn Cybereason.

The Boston-based startup announced a $100 million investment led by SoftBank, along with a CEO change.

Executive Vice President of SoftBank Eric Gan will now serve as the company’s CEO — pending board and regulatory approvals — with Lior Div, current CEO and co-founder, transitioning to the role of adviser.

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The news comes after reports in October that the company hired JPMorgan Chase & Co. to find a buyer for the company.

It has been reported the company has had two rounds of layoffs, cutting 100 jobs in June and then another 200 in October.

Big money

It was just more than a year ago that the company confidentially filed for an initial public offering that would have valued it at more than $5 billion, Reuters reported at the time.

It was less than two years ago that Cybereason was raising big money at an even bigger valuation. In July 2021, the startup announced it had raised $275 million in a financing led by Liberty Strategic Capital, the fund started by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

No valuation was given by the company, but reports at the time in both the Globes newspaper in Israel and The Boston Globe said the round valued the company at about $3.1 billion.

Cybereason’s platform offers a full array for protection, including endpoint detection and response and extended detection and response. XDR platforms are highly scalable and offer companies better visibility in network and application communication. XDR solutions can read and group related alerts and build timelines concerning attacks by evaluating data found on activity logs.

Threat detection and response capabilities across endpoints and the network has become even more important with so many people working from home and expanding the attack surface available to bad actors.

Cybereason is one of the best-funded startups in cybersecurity, with more than $800 million raised, per Crunchbase data.

Now the question is: What will investors get for all that money?

Illustration: Dom Guzman