Cybersecurity

After Nearly 6 Years, SMB Cybersecurity Provider Redacted Emerges From Stealth With $35M

San Francisco-based cybersecurity provider Redacted officially emerged from stealth with a $35 million Series B to help small and medium-sized businesses be more secure.

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The new round was led by Ten Eleven Ventures, with participation from Valor Equity Partners and SVB Capital. Founded in 2015, the company has raised a total of $60 million.

While Redacted has been in “stealth” since its founding, it has accumulated a customer list of dozens of SMBs that helped it develop the platform. The company felt the time was right to enter the market as more SMBs are making the transition to the cloud and need help to remain secure from attacks and threats, said co-founder and CEO Max Kelly.

“We decided to do this round to help us come out of stealth and scale the company,” he said. “People are moving to the cloud … many of them are doing it piecemeal. All they’re doing then is creating more attack surface.”

The big market of SMBs

Redacted’s platform offers advanced threat intelligence and response capabilities, giving SMBs security and monitoring services many do not have the resources to do themselves. While the company targets the SMB market, the definition of SMBs can vary. Kelly said his company typically looks at companies with $50 million to $1.5 billion in sales.

The 55-person company will use the money to attack what it sees as a wide-open market. While large players like CrowdStrike and FireEye have offerings in which they can basically become a company’s security team, those platforms are often geared toward enterprises, Kelly said. There also are managed security service providers looking to sell to the SMB market, but do not offer the higher level of product and services Redacted can, he added.

“We look for markets where we see white space,” said Alex Doll, founder and managing general partner at TenEleven Ventures. “It’s a large market with old technology.

“What the SMB market needs is a complete solution brought to them, and at a reasonable price point,” he said.

Kelly — who has served as chief security officer at Facebook and before that worked at the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command — said he sees the market coming to the company. He has never believed security can stop all breaches, something the market did not want to hear five years ago. Now the market is understanding attacks will occur and how you respond is what matters.

“Working to prevent  breaches is impossible,” he said. “Working to stop the damage done from breaches is what we can do.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.

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