On a day when all eyes were on the Google-Mandiant deal, Axonius on Tuesday had a deal of its own, announcing that it closed $200 million in Series E funding for a $2.6 billion valuation.
A leader in cybersecurity asset management and the growing field of SaaS management, Axonius closed 2021 with a 132% year-over-year increase in annual recurring revenue, marking its third consecutive year of triple-digit growth.
The company also expanded its team by 174% and now has representation in every major region worldwide. Axonius has been a leader in attack surface management and recently launched AxoniusX, its SaaS management platform. Prominent customers include Schneider Electric, The New York Times, Wacom, MindBody and Landmark Health.
“We are on a mission to become the system of record for all infrastructure, and this latest funding round will enable us to get there more quickly,” said Dean Sysman, CEO of Axonius. “By connecting to hundreds of security and management solutions that know about assets, we give organizations the visibility they need to manage complex IT environments.”
Axonius has become a leader in the emerging category of security asset management, said Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst and ESG Fellow. Oltsik said existing methods are no longer adequate as they are based on manual processes and lots of data sources and tools.
“It also takes most organizations more than 80 hours to do a full asset inventory, and that’s just the start of things as they still have to analyze and act upon the data once it’s collected,” Oltsik said. “Axonius automates data collection and provides data analytics to streamline and automate this. In an era where the attack surface is growing precipitously, it’s a big improvement.”
It sounds basic, but security starts with visibility, said Frank Dickson, program vice president for security and trust at IDC. Dickson explained that the task of visibility is not trivial given the complexity created by the instruments of digital transformation, such has hybrid, multi-cloud IT, microservices-based applications, IoT, and SaaS.
“Visibility is just the beginning as seeing is the first step,” Dickson said. “Classifying and evaluating are steps two and three. The result is that cyber asset discovery and management has become an increasingly important function for security hygiene.”
