Cybersecurity scaleup Awake Security has secured $36m in new investment to boost its product development and marketing efforts.
The Series C round was led by Evolution Equity Partners with participation from Energize Ventures and Liberty Global Ventures. Existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and Greylock Partners also added funding.
As part of the deal, Karthik Subramanian, partner at Evolution Equity, has joined Asheem Chandna, Enrique Salem and Kevin Mandia on the company’s board of directors. The the new capital injection brings Awake Security’s total funding to nearly $80m.
“Awake has assembled the best minds in networking, machine learning, data science, cybersecurity, and other disciplines to create something entirely new that fills a massive void in the security market,” said Rahul Kashyap, CEO of Awake Security.
“By partnering with Evolution Equity with its deep U.S. and European network and cybersecurity expertise, and strategic investors Energize Ventures and Liberty Global, we’re building on that momentum to bring the Awake platform to even more organisations around the globe.”
Awake Security will, in particular, build on its momentum by using the new money to boost its R&D, sales and marketing to meet the growing demand for the company’s advanced network traffic analysis platform.
Awake claims that it has increased its annual recurring revenue (ARR) by close to 700% and doubled its employee headcount over the past year. The company has displaced several established vendors, including those using AI-based techniques, and has established itself as a market leader for network detection and response, shadow IT, remote worker and contractor security, digital network packet forensics and threat hunting.
“The new network – from the data centre to cloud workloads, IoT, and SaaS applications – is fundamental to the business success of organisations, especially as more and more of the workforce becomes distributed. Security solutions have just not been adequate at enabling this transformation – until Awake,” said Subramanian.
“We invested in Awake because we recognize its unique ability to help organizations fight modern threats. The traction and the third-party recognition Awake has received combined with our resources in and knowledge of the US and European markets only bolsters our conviction.”
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
