$130 Million Vectra Funding Round to Expand Markets, Platform

Vectra executives say partners will benefit from the threat detection and response provider’s latest funding round.

Blackstone Growth led a $130 million round, raising the company’s total to $350 million. The investment firm cited the recent SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange security incidents as indicators of the growing role of cybersecurity.

Blackstone’s James Socas

“As organizations around the world increasingly focus on cybersecurity, we believe Vectra is providing a critical solution that levels the playing field against the sophisticated actors that generate the most damaging cyberthreats,” said James Socas, a managing director at Blackstone.

The new funding will help Vectra expand into “new markets and geographies,” in addition to expanding its Cognito platform. The vendor touts its R&D investments as higher than the average security vendor.

Vectra president and CEO Hitesh Sheth said cyberattacks as “impactful and widespread” as ever.

Vectra’s Hiteth Sheth

“To protect their employees and digital assets, our customers require security solutions that are smarter than today’s adversaries and provide coverage for cloud, data centers and SaaS applications,” Sheth said. “As we look to the future, Blackstone’s global presence, operational resources, and in-house technology expertise will help us achieve our mission to become one of the dominant cybersecurity companies in the world.”

According to Vectra, the company’s Cognito Detect for Microsoft Office 365 sales have grown more than 700%. Vectra holds a $1.2 billion valuation, according to today’s announcement.

Vectra Partners

Jessica Couto, who leads channel for the San Jose, California-based company, sad the Vectra partner base has grown significantly. Those partners include system integrators, managed security service providers, incident response companies and professional service partners.

“We are enabling them to be self-sufficient and effective in using our platform to secure customers,” Couto said. “With the recent global supply chain breaches, we have seen various needs coming from partners, which we have been able to fulfill.”

Vectra’s Jessica Couto

Couto said partners will benefit from he funding round.

“As a channel-focused company, our partners will benefit from the continued innovation to solving the most challenging security problems and the opportunity to build services around those offerings. Our partners can differentiate their services with our multicloud approach that address identity (for example, Azure AD), productivity applications (for example, Office365) and cloud (AWS) applications as well the networks and data centers with a single threat detection and response platform,” Couto said.

Vectra last week expanded its endpoint detection and response (EDR) ecosystem to support new integration partners.