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Cybereason Raises $200M Led By SoftBank, Continuing Cybersecurity’s Boom

Cybereason, a startup focused on you guessed it, cybersecurity, announced this morning it has raised $200 million from SoftBank Group and its affiliates. The company’s valuation is around $1 billion, though reports vary as to whether it’s a little less, or a little more than that figure.

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The company uses big data analytics to identify and handle cyber attacks. Specifically, CEO Lior Dov says the company’s mission is to help “security teams prevent more attacks, sooner, in ways that enable understanding and taking decisive action faster” with the help of AI.

Over the past two years, Cybereason said it has increased its customer base by 300 percent “with over six million endpoints under protection.” (In cybersecurity, endpoint protection refers to securing devices at the end of a network; laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and so forth. In a world of both big data and strengthening mobile networks, endpoint security is a natural growth industry thanks to the secular shifts towards greater data collection and retention, and an increasingly mobile workforce.)

Cybereason is based in Boston but has 500 employees working out of its home base and offices in Tel Aviv, Tokyo, London and Sydney, Australia. Israeli military veterans founded the company in 2012.

In its press release, Cybereason said it plans to use the new capital toward ramping up operations with an eye toward “global growth in all geographies.” It also wants to aggressively expand its partner program and improve upon its endpoint security product.

The company is tipped to be headed for the public markets. According to an interview with Forbes, Cybereason is looking at a public debut when “market conditions” line up. Of course, that’s what every company looking at going public that isn’t quite ready yet says, so it’s hard to draw too much insight from the statement.

Notable, however, is the scale of capital that Cybereason just raised. Indeed, the company’s prior total capital raised to date was about $189 million (Softbank led its 2015 Series C and its 2017 Series D, for reference.) That means Cybereason just raised more in its Series E than it had raised before, added together. Previous investors include CRV, Spark Capital and Lockheed Martin.

Here’s a look at its fundraising history to date:

The new capital will likely delay its IPO; perhaps Cybereason could have gone public inside the next few quarters if it needed to. But with $200 million fresh dollars sitting in its accounts, why would it? And that means a company SoftBank has poured capital into a number of times could miss the current IPO window, a winsome season that has seen companies of all levels of quality go public.

As a final bit of context, recall that cybersecurity is a hot sector. Crunchbase News reported a grip of funding rounds in the space and a recent IPO to draw attention to cybersecurity’s rise. Cybereason is part of the same wave. Expect more, related rounds in the coming months.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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