Cybersecurity

Cybereason Lands $275M From Mnuchin’s New Firm And Others

Illustration of guard dogs protecting computer.

Boston-based security company Cybereason raised $275 million in a financing led by Liberty Strategic Capital, the fund started earlier this year by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

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Liberty invested $200 million for the round, while the other $75 million was from Irving Investors, certain funds advised by Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers, and Softbank Vision Fund 2, according to the company. Mnuchin will join Cybereason’s board.

This marks Liberty’s first investment, according to Cybereason. In February, The Washington Post reported Mnuchin was starting his own fund with money from sovereign wealth funds in the Persian Gulf region and other investors.

No valuation was given by the company, but reports in both the Globes newspaper in Israel and The Boston Globe say the round values the company at $3.1 billion. Cybereason most recently raised $200 million in 2019 from SoftBank and others at a valuation of around $1 billion.

The company, founded in 2012, has raised $664 million to date.

Cybereason’s platform offers a full array for protection including endpoint detection and response (EDR) and extended detection and response (XDR) — which has become quite popular this year as cybersecurity funding has taken off.

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.

The platform’s 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.

Before going public in June, Mountain View, California-based AI endpoint security provider SentinelOne bought data analytics platform Scalyr for $155 million in February. That was followed by  CrowdStrike buying London-based cloud log management provider Humio for $400 million just nine days later.

Both companies mentioned how the acquisitions extend their XDR capabilities by taking in data from logs and applications in real time.

During a second-quarter earnings call in February, Palo Alto Networks’ CEO Nikesh Arora credited his company’s XDR platform — called Cortex XDR — with protecting it from the SolarWinds attack.

Aside from Cybereason, other venture-backed companies such as Cynet, Hunters Cyber and Bitdefender also compete in the space to some degree, as does Skyview Capital-owned Fidelis Cybersecurity.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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