AlienVault has closed a $52 million Series E funding round, which brings the company's total funding raised to nearly $116 million.
The company will use the funding to scale its global sales and marketing programs and to increase investments in product innovation for its Unified Security Management (USM) platform and Open Threat Exchange (OTX).
AlienVault recently marked bookings growth exceeding 65% year-over-year and new customer growth exceeding 75%. Those customers include Columbia University, Peet's Coffee & Tea, NASA and Save Mart.
"With today's rapidly changing threat landscape, technology alone is not enough in the battle against cybercrime,” said Barmak Meftah, president and CEO of AlienVault. “At AlienVault, we unify the security products, intelligence and community which enable all organizations—regardless of size—to quickly detect and respond to today's threats. This round of funding will allow us to make the investments needed to rapidly expand our reach into this large market opportunity."
AlienVault’s sweet spot is clear: Gartner predicts global cybersecurity spending will reach $76.9 billion this year as organizations become more "threat-aware." However, many mid-market companies lack the IT budget and technical expertise needed to deploy numerous point security products and gather and analyze enough actionable information to stay ahead of threats. AlienVault’s platforms focus on threat detection and incident response, particularly for IT teams with limited resources, be they budget, people or technology.
AlienVault is taking an unusual architecture tack as well; its OTX for example is essentially social media platform for the security community.
Instead of relying on the traditional contribution-based model for sharing threat intelligence, OTX is built on a foundation of a social networking architecture that allows the OTX community—which has 26,000 participants—to actively discuss, explore, validate and share the latest threat data, trends, techniques and research. Members contribute about 1 million threat indicators per day.
Users can import and export indicators of compromise for security tools via the open API, as well as collaborate with researchers and other members of the security community. Users can also create or subscribe to an existing “Pulse,” an analysis of a particular threat that provides a summary of the impact, as well as get a view into the software targeted and related indicators of compromise used to detect threats.
The funding round follows AlienVault's appointment of Brian Robins, who previously held executive management positions at CSC, Verisign, and Neustar, as the company's CFO. The company also recently released new versions of USM and OTX, and introduced USM for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
New investor Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) led the round with strong participation from existing investors, including Trident Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and GGV Capital. As part of the funding, Steve Harrick, general partner at IVP, will join the board of directors as an observer.
"AlienVault is a security visionary, focused on developing a new category of unified security management and actionable threat intelligence. Their products help companies detect and deflect targeted attacks in an efficient and timely manner," said Harrick. "AlienVault offers organizations a unique solution to protect their sensitive data and core infrastructure. We were especially impressed by the company's strong executive team and board, their practical approach to the market and their enthusiastic and devoted customers."