In Growing Cybersecurity Market, Darktrace Raises $50M Series E

Cybersecurity platform Darktrace has raised $50 million in Series E funding. The round was led by Vitruvian Partners. Previous investors KKR and TenEleven Ventures also participated.

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The company has raised $229.5 million in total known funding. That includes the company’s $75 million Series D in July 2011. (Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan told Crunchbase News in an email that $25 million of that round was secondary market financing.) The company is now valued at $1.65 billion, post-money.

Founded in 2013, Darktrace deploys an AI-powered cybersecurity software that assesses normal behavior, detects abnormalities, and automatically responds to threats. The company has also launched an autonomous response platform for cloud systems and an email threat mitigation platform.

“Darktrace is a self-contained system that is deployed in less than an hour, requiring zero human configuration or training,” Eagan told Crunchbase News in an email. “Once deployed, it instantly begins learning ‘normal’ for the network, and is identifying genuine threats and anomalies in just seven days.”

The company is based in Cambridge, UK but has offices globally. The company currently “operates within 7,000 unique networks,” and its customers range in industry from retail to government. Eagan told Crunchbase News the company is also working with local and state governments in the U.S., including the City of Las Vegas and Livingston County.

The company isn’t releasing specific revenue metrics, but Eagan wrote that Darktrace has grown by 100% over the past year, and that its company-wide contract agreements totaled $400 million.

With the funding, the company plans to increase its 750 global headcount to 1,000 by the end of the year. It also plans to open more global offices in “regions where demand is highest.”

Cybersecurity has been a hot topic among governments and in the venture world recently. Other companies are leveraging AI for cybersecurity including Cylance and Crowdstrike (valued at $3 billion) which raised $120 million and $200 million, respectively, in June 2018. When asked what how Darktrace differs from its competitors, Eagan told Crunchbase News that the “speed, precision, and power of [the Darktrace] technology is simply unmatched.”

Illustration Credit: Li Anne Dias

Editiorial Update: A previous version of this article stated that the company had raised $179.5 million, that was not inclusive of the current round. It has since been updated.