At a glance.
- Coalfire acquires Denim Group.
- [redacted] emerges from stealth with $35 million in Series B funding.
- Exabeam raises $200 million in Series F round.
Mergers and acquisitions.
Colorado-based security firm Coalfire has acquired Denim Group, an application security company based in San Antonio, Texas. Coalfire said, in announcing the acquisition, "The power of Denim Group’s ThreadFix, and recently acquired Neuralys Attack Surface Management platform, signifies Coalfire’s commitment to delivering a risk-based and holistic threat and vulnerability management solution for discovery, rationalization, prioritization, and tracking of all vulnerabilities across an enterprise."
Microsoft has acquired Fulton, Maryland-based firmware and IoT security company ReFirm Labs. Microsoft stated, "The addition of ReFirm Labs to Microsoft will bring both world-class expertise in firmware security and the Centrifuge firmware platform to enhance our ability to analyze and help protect firmware backed by the power and speed of our cloud."
London-based cybersecurity technology commercialization company Crossword Cybersecurity Plc has acquired digital credentialing company Verifiable Credentials Limited,
Accenture has acquired Sydney, Australia-based cloud consultancy Industrie&Co, CRN reports. Accenture stated, "Industrie&Co brings to Accenture a deep heritage in cloud infrastructure engineering, offering organisations a comprehensive service suite encompassing capabilities across strategy, design and delivery of cloud products and platforms."
Accenture Federal Services is acquiring McLean, Virginia-based advanced analytics company Novetta. Accenture Federal Services CEO John Goodman stated, "Novetta will bring expanded capabilities, broad client relationships, and unique assets that complement our work in the national security sector and add greater scale to our digital capabilities."
Thales and Atos have launched a joint venture, "Athea," that will "develop a sovereign big data and artificial intelligence platform for public and private sector players in the defence, intelligence and internal state security communities." Thales added, "Athea will draw on the experience gained by both companies from the demonstration phase of the ARTEMIS programme, the big data platform of the French Ministry of Armed Forces. The contract to optimise and prepare the full-scale roll-out of the ARTEMIS platform was also awarded jointly to the two leaders by the French Defense Procurement Agency on April 30, 2021. The new joint venture will initially serve the French market before addressing European requirements at a later date."
Chicago-based legal and compliance software provider Relativity has acquired Text IQ, a New York-headquartered company that uses AI to identify sensitive information. Relativity stated, "Text IQ will continue to focus on selling to and servicing the industry and its customers and innovating its technology. It will work with the Relativity team to build a seamless integration between its products while also embedding some of its core capabilities to improve existing AI and ML functionality in RelativityOne and Relativity Trace—providing Relativity's 300,000 users with access to Text IQ's leading AI capabilities."
New Jersey-based cloud backup provider OwnBackup has acquired Santa Clara, California-based data integration company Nimmetry, which has "a significant presence in Hyderabad, India." OwnBackup's CEO Sam Gutmann stated, "The entrance into the Indian market and the access to the talented professionals that are now part of the OwnBackup family marks the continuance of a long-term commitment on OwnBackup’s part to providing industry-leading products and services to help our customers protect their mission critical SaaS data."
Investments and exits.
Foster City, California-based security analytics and automation provider Exabeam has raised $200 million in a Series F round led by the Owl Rock division of Blue Owl Capital, with participation from existing investors Acrew Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Norwest Venture Partners. The round brings the company's valuation to $2.4 billion. The company has also appointed Michael DeCesare as CEO and President. DeCesare was most recently CEO and President at Forescout Technologies. Exabeam's co-founder and former CEO Nir Polak "will continue on as an active member of the executive team and remain at the company. Additionally, Polak will assume the role of chairman of the board."
Massachusetts-headquartered cloud-native security analytics provider Uptycs has raised $50 million in a Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Sapphire Ventures and ServiceNow. The company's co-founder and CEO Ganesh Pai told TechCrunch, "It was one of those things where the round came in primarily as a function of execution and success to date, and we decided to capitalize on that because we know the partners and raised the capital so that we could use it meaningfully for a couple of different things, primarily sales and marketing acceleration."
San Francisco-based SMB security provider and threat intelligence firm [redacted] has emerged from stealth with $35 million in a Series B round led by Ten Eleven Ventures, with participation from Valor Equity Partners and SVB Capital. The company says it "will use the funding to scale and accelerate adoption of its state-of-the-art platform and advanced threat intelligence and response capabilities that enable organizations to level the playing field against sophisticated attackers, disrupt their adversaries and protect their businesses."
Israeli 5G security company SAM Seamless Networks has raised $20 million in a Series B round led by BlackBerry and Verizon Ventures, with participation from Blumberg Capital, Intel Capital, ADT, and NightDragon. The company says the funding will "accelerate SAM’s growth, enabling the expansion of its security reach from currently protecting 2M networks and 70M devices globally, to securing 10M networks and 500M devices by the end of 2021."
Chicago-based infrastructure-as-code security company oak9 has raised $5.9 million in a seed round led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Hyde Park Angels and Uncorrelated Ventures. The company says it "will use the capital to continue to invest in R&D, further define the IaC security landscape, and acquire additional customers."
Executive moves.
MemCrypt, an Edinburgh Napier University spin-out focused on ransomware, has appointed Pete Jaco as CEO.
Shift5 has named Joe Lea as its new president. Lea previously led Product at Armis.
Pindrop has appointed Collin Davis as its first Chief Technology Officer. Davis previously served as a General Manager for Productivity Apps at Amazon Web Services.
Zerto has promoted Avi Raichel to Chief Operating Officer and Deepak Verma to Vice President of Product Management.
Deloitte has added Amy Chaput and Monica McEwen to its Government & Public Services consulting practice, WashingtonExec reports. Chaput is a former acting Chief Technology Officer for the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. McEwen previously served as Public Sector Vice President at ThoughtSpot.
Bishop Fox has hired Patty Wright as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Consulting. Wright most recently served as Vice President and General Manager of Customer Experience at Cisco.
Trustwave has hired Spencer Ingram as Senior Vice President of Operations and Oriana Vogel as Chief Human Resources Officer. The company has also promoted Marco Pereira to Senior Vice President of Strategy and Transformation and Edwin Lim to General Manager, Asia.
Ermetic has appointed Toby Buschini as Vice President of Worldwide Sales.
Forcepoint has hired Myles Bray as Senior Vice-President of EMEA Sales and Peter Brant as Senior Vice President of North America Sales.
AdaptiveMobile Security has appointed Naosuke Akiyama as VP of Sales for Japan.
Axis Security has appointed Paul Davis as Vice President of Customer Success. Davis most recently served as Director of Customer Success for Splunk.
Companies in the news.
Reuters reports that energy companies are "scrambling" to buy cyber insurance following the ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline. Fitch Ratings has found that cyber insurance rates are rising:
"Cyber insurance direct written premiums for the property/casualty industry rose sharply 22% last year to over $2.7 billion, reflecting expanding demand for coverage. The industry statutory direct loss plus defense & cost containment (DCC) ratio for standalone cyber insurance rose sharply in 2020 to 73% compared with an average of 42% for the previous five years (2015-2019). The average paid loss for a closed standalone cyber claim moved to $358,000 in 2020 from $145,000 in 2019."