VMware To Acquire Lastline, Marking Thomvest Ventures’ Second Exit In A Week’s Time

VMware announced today its plans to acquire Lastline, which operates an AI-driven malware detection platform.

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Redwood City, California-based Lastline has raised a total of $52.2 million since its 2011 inception, according to Crunchbase data.

Thomvest Ventures led its last raise, a $28.5 million Series C  in July 2017 that valued the company at about $114 million. While VMWare did not disclose how much it is paying for Lastline, sources familiar with the deal peg the purchase price at “north” of that $114 million valuation.

Other investors include Redpoint and e.ventures.

This marks the second exit for Thomvest Ventures in the past week. Last Thursday, we reported that Cisco had plans to purchase ThousandEyes for a reported $1 billion.

VMware said it expects the Lastline buy to close during its fiscal quarter ending July 31. A source told TechCrunch that VMware will let go of some 40 percent of Lastline’s employees—about 50 staffers—as part of the acquisition. This news has not yet been confirmed by either company.

In a blog, VMware’s vice president of corporate development, Alex Wang, wrote that “Lastline detects and contains sophisticated threats before they disrupt business.”

He added that, “Lastline will bring world-class threat research from a renowned group of academic cybersecurity researchers.”

Lastline will give VMware a way to further increase the capabilities provided by its VMware Carbon Black Threat Analysis Unit with network-centric threat research and behavioral analysis, Wang said.

“This will help accelerate our customers’ journeys toward intrinsic security,” he wrote. “We’ll add new tools to make security intrinsic across highly distributed, multi-cloud environments connected by a virtual cloud network, enabling any app on any cloud on any device.”

VMware, has made a known 46 acquisitions over time, according to Crunchbase data. This year, it also picked up  Octarine, and Nyansa, a Palo Alto,California-based startup that raised $27 million in venture funding.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias