Cybersecurity company Immersive Labs has closed a $75 million Series C funding round as the company looks to again double this year and nearly triple its workforce in the next 18 months.
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The round was led by new investors Insight Partners, with participation from Menlo Ventures, Citi Ventures, and existing investor Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Founded in 2017, the company has now received $123 million in venture funding.
Unlike many cybersecurity firms, Immersive does not develop endpoint solutions or firewalls to safeguard companies, but rather has created a platform to measure and improve cybersecurity skills across businesses. The company’s Cyber Workforce Optimization platform helps test different aspects of the business for readiness against cyberattacks — from developers and analysts all the way to a company’s executive team, said founder and CEO James Hadley.
“Cybersecurity is no longer the jobs of the geeks in the basement,” Hadley joked. “It is for everyone in the business.”
The platform
Immersive helps measure how a company would react to an attack and shows what the results may be if those actions are followed — all the way down to what a company’s stock price may be after that response.
The company saw revenue double last year, and is shooting for similar results this year. Immersive — which has U.K. and Boston headquarters — has more than 200 customers, many of them large Global 2000 companies, Hadley said. The company plans to use its new funding to add more data and analytics to its platform and grow from about 220 employees to 600 in the next 18 months as it looks to expand in both Europe and the Asia Pacific region.
Hadley said he feels Immersive’s solutions are necessary as companies need more and better security talent — not just new technology.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, principal at Insight, said a constant theme he hears is the dearth of cyber talent relative to these “chief information security officers” growing need to best protect their businesses.
“Immersive Labs emerged as the market-leading product to help every cyber analyst fine-tune their skills in the context of real-time threats they are seeing,” he said. “The company’s incredible momentum and clear market opportunity, coupled with resoundingly positive customer feedback from customers like HSBC and NHS, gave us the confidence to pursue an investment.”
As companies see the need to measure and analyze results to the growing landscape of cyber threats, Hadley believes Immersive’s market only will grow. While companies do spend money on training from organizations like SANS and Secure Code Warrior, Hadley said he sees no direct competitor in the market.
Hadley added that he believes the company can be the next public company out of England, following in the footsteps of Darktrace, which successfully went public on the London Stock Exchange in April.
According to Rosenbaum; “Immersive Labs has an opportunity to be a large standalone company within its respective swim lane in the cybersecurity stack.”
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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