Cloud-based XDR company Securonix announced Tuesday a more than $1 billion growth investment led by Vista Equity Partners to focus its efforts on improving Securonix Threat Labs, extend to the application layer and bring in talent to support internet-of-things efforts, especially those tied to operational technology.
The company said previously received a $53 million investment, but did not disclose its current valuation.
The news created a buzz Tuesday in the burgeoning extended detection and response (XDR) market, which has attracted the attention of industry heavyweights such as Cisco, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and others such as Arctic Wolf and Cybereason, each promising to spend billions of dollars delivering on the promise of XDR in the years ahead.
Sachin Nayyar, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said the investors funded Securonix because the company has built a cloud-native platform that scales infinitely, is driven by analytics, and has all the core capabilities to solve today and tomorrow’s complex security monitoring challenges. Nayyar cited that Securonix has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant the past three years, positioned furthest for completeness of vision this past year, and ranked highest across all three use cases in critical capabilities.
“At the end of the day, it’s not about the bells and whistles and fancy UIs, but making sure customers can easily, effectively secure modern environments against advanced threats,” Nayyar said. “Our business growth speaks for itself.
“We’ve surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Over the past year, we grew SaaS ARR by 100%, grew new MSSP logo bookings by 240% and grew employee headcount by 100%, eclipsing 1,000 employees worldwide," Nayyar added. "This is all because of our product efficacy.”
A billion dollars is a lot of money, but so is the XDR market opportunity, said Frank Dickson, program vice president for security and trust at IDC.
Dickson said digital transformation has revolutionized the manner that products and services are provided, injecting technology into business processes to make society more efficient and effective. However, Dickson said the benefits of digital transformation come with a dark side that we seldom acknowledge: complexity. This complexity results in vulnerabilities and configuration gaps, even the smallest of which can place businesses at the mercy of the cyber threat actors.
“XDR hopes to address this issue of complexity and the problems it creates for security,’" Dickson explained. “XDR is a really simple concept: Aggregate telemetry across multiple security and non-security tools, analyze that telemetry to detect maliciousness, and respond or remediate. The promise is great. But even $1 billion dollars does not guarantee success for Securonix.”
