Today AlienVault, the leading provider of Unified Security Management and crowd-sourced threat intelligence, announced a $26.5M financing, led by GGV Capital, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Trident Capital, Sigma West and other existing and new investors. We’re very excited to be leading this round of financing and I’m personally looking forward to serving on AlienVault’s board.
We jumped at the opportunity to lead this financing round in AlienVault. Our enthusiasm for the company and opportunity is driven by several key factors:
- Quality of Team. AlienVault is run by Barmak Meftah, the former Chief Product Officer of Fortify Software. Barmak has assembled a strong and experienced team of technology, sales and marketing executives from companies such as Fortify and Solar Winds. At GGV Capital, our best investments have been driven by great leaders who’ve assembled top notch teams such as Lars Dalgaard at Successfactors, Jack Ma at Alibaba and Mike Lazerow at Buddy Media. We believe Barmak and his team possess similar capabilities and we’re grateful they selected GGV as the lead financing partner in this round from a long list of interested funds.
- Enormity of the Opportunity. Hardly a day goes by these days without news of a major IT security breach. These attacks are no longer being carried out by disconnected, thrill-seeking, young hackers but are now the province of state-sponsored cyber warfare and organized crime, where large losses of IP and market value hang in the balance. Companies of all sizes now recognize they must protect themselves. This has created lots of tailwind for AlienVault with large, mid-size and smaller businesses.
- Product Approach & Business Model. While products that block and prevent routine attacks, such as firewalls and anti-virus software, have already been brought together under unified platforms to make them simple and affordable, until now there hasn’t been a solution that unifies the tools necessary to provide comprehensive threat detection and security visibility. With its Unified Security Management (USM) platform, AlienVault is the first company that has built a platform that federates security information from all parts of a network to identify and thwart attacks. AlienVault uses the very same tools that hackers use to perpetrate attacks, turning these tools around to create secure environments and enabling customers to fight hackers proactively rather than the typical reactive model. AlienVault also takes advantage of real time intelligence gathered from the thousands of users of its open source products, and has created the largest repository of up-to-date threat intelligence information. As the velocity of exploits and vulnerabilities grow with network complexity, this repository has become indispensible to AlienVault’s growing customer base.
With all this these factors at play, AlienVault is growing rapidly with a very attractive business model. We look forward to great things from our partnership with Barmak and his team at AlienVault!