ThreatLocker, Fortress Latest Cybersecurity Providers Netting Massive Investments
Cybersecurity remains an attractive market for private equity and other investors.
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Antoine Jones is ThreatLocker‘s vice president of MSP sales.
“This latest round of funding allows for the continued expansion and support for our highly effective cybersecurity products,” he said. “Partners have been and will continue to be key to ThreatLocker’s growth. This allows us to serve them at even higher levels with continuing education, training and marketing support. We’re investing heavily in our channel strategy because it brings further success to our partners.”
Omdia’s Eric Parizo said ThreatLocker is positioning itself as a zero trust specialist for the channel. It helps service providers manage endpoint access with various policy-based controls.
“The market sees that as an increasingly attractive approach given how challenging it is to consistently update and control endpoints that may frequently move across various insecure network environments.”
At last week’s MSP Summit, co-located with the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, Danny Jenkins, ThreatLocker’s CEO, said his company has extended its zero-trust control technologies from application control to ringfencing, storage, elevation and network controls.
ThreatLocker said the new investment follows a year of “skyrocketing growth” as it quadrupled its revenue and workforce. The company has thousands of partners and protects more than 23,000 organizations
Gary Reiner is operating partner at General Atlantic.
“ThreatLocker effectively takes the guesswork out of threat detection with its zero-trust approach,” he said. “As companies of all sizes increasingly focus on filling in gaps in their security stacks, zero trust is becoming a necessity. And we view ThreatLocker as an emerging leader in this paradigm shift. We’re thrilled to partner with the team to accelerate ThreatLocker’s growth as an endpoint security disruptor.”
Founded in 2015, the Fortress platform enables customers in critical industries to assess, manage and address risks associated with vendors, assets and software in their supply chains. The solution was co-developed with electric utilities and has since grown into a consortium tool that includes five of North America’s 10 largest investor-owned utilities. Fortress’ platform secures 40% of the U.S. power grid, national defense-related assets, and critical manufacturing industries.
Peter Kassabov is Fortress’ executive chairman and co-founder.
“We started Fortress because we recognized major supply chain vulnerabilities in our country’s most critical industries,” he said. “Many recent high-profile breaches have spawned a new wave of regulatory action in the U.S. that will likely expand for the foreseeable future.”
Parizo said the Fortress case is a “bit more unusual, as we’ve observed what may be acute oversaturation in the OT and IoT security market segment.”
“While such a big investment is a bit more of a potential outlier given the increased likelihood for market contraction, Fortress seems to have made very strong early inroads in specific areas of critical infrastructure, securing nearly half of the U.S. power grid and many top utilities, a very positive indicator of likely future success,” he said. “Its Asset to Vendor network, a threat intelligence-sharing network for IoT and OT systems, has also grown rapidly, with more than 40,000 companies having contributed.”
Will Chen is managing director within Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
“Fortress has established itself as a market leader in end-to-end supply chain cybersecurity solutions for U.S. critical industries,” he said. “And we look forward to scaling the company’s Asset-to-Vendor network, which provides significant value to critical infrastructure suppliers and customers. The depth and breadth of the Fortress platform are unmatched and we believe there is a meaningful opportunity to accelerate the expansion of the platform into compelling product adjacencies, including software and hardware bill of materials, workflow orchestration, and additional analytics and reporting capabilities.”
Will Chen is managing director within Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
“Fortress has established itself as a market leader in end-to-end supply chain cybersecurity solutions for U.S. critical industries,” he said. “And we look forward to scaling the company’s Asset-to-Vendor network, which provides significant value to critical infrastructure suppliers and customers. The depth and breadth of the Fortress platform are unmatched and we believe there is a meaningful opportunity to accelerate the expansion of the platform into compelling product adjacencies, including software and hardware bill of materials, workflow orchestration, and additional analytics and reporting capabilities.”
ThreatLocker and Fortress Information Security (Fortress) are the latest cybersecurity companies to receive $100 million or more in investment funding.
ThreatLocker has raised $100 million in Series C funding led by global growth equity firm General Atlantic. Existing investors Elephant VC and Arthur Ventures also participated in the funding.
Fortress has received a $125 million strategic investment from funds managed by the private equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
With the new investment, ThreatLocker said it will focus on accelerating product innovation to bring zero-trust security to more organizations. It’ll also hire top talent and accelerate its global expansion.
Fortress said the funding supports its mission of securing U.S. critical industries from cybersecurity and operational threats emanating from their supply chains. Existing investors will continue to support Fortress. Those include co-founders Peter Kassabov and Alex Santos, ClearSky, First Analysis, American Electric Power and more.
Eric Parizo is principal analyst of Omdia’s cybersecurity operations intelligence service.
Omdia’s Eric Parizo
“Cybersecurity remains an attractive market for private equity and other investors because the demand for innovative cybersecurity solutions remains at an all-time high,” he said. “Enterprises still struggle to thwart intrusions and breaches due to the myriad issues including ransomware, privilege management and unauthorized access. And there’s certainly a need for innovative solutions offering a zero trust-centric protection for the distributed enterprise.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for more on the ThreatLocker and Fortress funding news.
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