Nozomi Networks Founders and Team
I’m super excited with today’s news that Nozomi Networks has announced a $15M Series B financing. The round was led by Invenergy Future Fund, a great strategic partner for Nozomi based on their focus on innovation in the energy sector. GGV Capital and the other existing investors, Lux Capital and Planven Investments, along with new investor THI Investments, participated meaningfully in the round as well.
The frequency and severity of attacks against the world’s critical infrastructure, particularly for the electric/ power grid, oil & gas and manufacturing verticals, has increased dramatically. Nozomi has emerged as the leader in securing these industrial control systems (ICS), and since GGV co-led the company’s Series A financing in October 2016, progress has been nothing short of remarkable. Highlighting Nozomi’s spectacular results over the past year have been customer acquisition, product development and partnerships.
Customers & Revenue. For ’17, Nozomi beat their internal bookings plan and shattered our expectations for the number and size of major new accounts acquired during the year. Exiting ’17, Nozomi now has major energy customers across North America, Europe, South America and the Middle East. The company has over 200 deployments globally and has penetrated energy, oil & gas, manufacturing and other sectors. As a result, Nozomi grew bookings and revenue by 5x, and the pipeline suggests the company is poised for continued rapid growth.
Product Development. Nozomi’s speed of product development is best in class among the GGV portfolio. The company’s rate of innovation has enabled Nozomi to extend its lead meaningfully relative to the competition as well. Nozomi now delivers real-time ICS monitoring, anomaly threat detection, network visualization, asset inventory and vulnerability assessment. The company won every product bake-off in which it participated in ’17 and the industry is taking note.
Partnership Progress. Given the strength of Nozomi’s products and customer progress, partners are eager to forge ties. During ’17, Nozomi announced a comprehensive field partnership with FireEye. This relationship has already borne fruit for Nozomi, and FireEye carefully evaluated all the key products in the market, choosing Nozomi and providing further validation of the company’s leadership in ICS security. Nozomi also continued its close partnership with Fortinet and expect several new announcements in ’18 on the partner front.
While the sophistication of the adversary and the nature of the threats within ICS continues to get scarier, the industry needs an innovative partner with a comprehensive solution. Hence, Nozomi’s future looks incredibly bright.