Exabeam Raises $50 Million Series D To Automate Threat Mitigation

Cybersecurity platform Exabeam has raised $50 million in a Series D led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Aspect Ventures, Cisco Investments, Icon Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners. Other firms also participated in the round.

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Founded in 2013, this is the fourth capital infusion for Exabeam. Prior to this round, the company picked up $30 million in a Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Cisco Investments. Its Series D brings the company’s total known funding to $115 million.

Exabeam relies on the collection of massive amounts of data, what ’s known as a “data lake,” to trace and hunt down security threats. With machine learning technology that flags anomalies in employee behavior, its technology recognizes and mitigates threats automatically.

Co-Founder and CEO of Exabeam Nir Polak told Crunchbase News that security systems can no longer be reliant on human-based analysis, as the sheer amount of information to be processed, and the number of endpoints to be protected, has increased over time.

“There are a lot more tools, a lot more users, [and] a lot more data. There are way more information sets to analyze,” Polak explained. With the amount of data to be processed shortages in security staff have brought on a need for more automated solutions.

Additionally, according to Polak, the nature of security threats themselves have made tracking and identifying possible security breaches much more difficult.

“Threats have become a lot more sophisticated–a lot more low and slow, trying to stay under the radar for a long time. It’s hard to find that needle in a haystack,” Polak explained, adding that adversaries are aiming to stealthily attack companies’ infrastructure by stealing the identity of employees. Exabeam’s heavily data-based analytics platform is able to detect even those sophisticated “low and slow” threats to a company’s system.

The company differentiates itself from industry incumbents also focused on data collection, like Splunk, with its fixed pricing model. According to Polak, other companies use pricing models that are based on the volume of data collected by the system. Exabeam, by contrast, charges its customers based on the number of employees in its organization, rather than the amount of data that the program collects and processes.

“We don’t believe the value of security is in the data. The value is in the response on top of it. So we wanted to create an all-you-can-eat pricing model,” Polak explained. “It’s not that we’re so so much cheaper than a Splunk. What our customers love about us is that it’s predictable. They know that we’re not going to hold them hostage to access their data.”

Exabeam has seen 300 and 250 percent growth over the last two fiscal years, according to its press release. The company currently has “way over” 200 active customers, and the average customer has about 12,000 employees, according to Polak.

While the company is not releasing revenue metrics, Polak told Crunchbase News that he believes the company is doing well against the competition. “We track ourselves against the currently publicly traded security companies, and we’re tracking way ahead of all of them,” he said.

Exabeam plans to use its fresh funding to continue their go-to-market strategy, investing in obtaining more market share in its home market, while also expanding its global efforts. Further, the company plans to increase its product offering for cloud security solutions for cloud-based companies.

As for the future of security, for Polak, it’s the more automation, the better. In the end, though, he believes the human is the biggest source of security breaches. “Really the weakest link is the human. We can’t really fix them,” he said. “If you’re able to solve that problem, you could become the next billionaire.”

Illustration Credit: Li Anne Dias