Cloud security firm HyTrust today announced that it has acquired data visibility and security company DataGravity, and raised $36 million in a new funding round.
Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, but members of the DataGravity team will join HyTrust. By acquiring DataGravity, HyTrust hopes to further enhance its security policy enforcement capabilities for cloud workloads through new data discovery and classification expertise.
DataGravity, which in the past years managed to raise a total of $92 million, exited stealth mode in 2014 when it launched Discovery, a platform that provided data security, and search and discovery capabilities. The company later released the DataGravity for Virtualization virtual appliance.
HyTrust’s decision to acquire DataGravity comes shortly after Forrester estimated that the global cloud security market will increase to $3.5 billion by 2021, which represents an annual growth rate of 28 percent.
“The acquisition will accelerate the expansion of HyTrust’s platform capabilities and capitalize on the high-growth cloud security market,” said Eric Chiu, co-founder and president of HyTrust. “DataGravity’s data discovery and classification capabilities support HyTrust’s mission to deliver a security policy framework that provides customers with full visibility, insight and enforcement of policy across workloads. We couldn’t be more excited.”
HyTrust also announced that it has closed a $36 million funding round led by investment firm Advance Venture Partners (AVP), which brings the total raised by the company to $100 million. Sway Ventures, Epic Ventures, Vanedge Capital, Trident Capital, and strategic investors Cisco, Fortinet, Intel and VMware also participated.
Part of the $36 million have been used to acquire DataGravity and the rest will go towards expanding sales and marketing efforts, and funding new product development.
“HyTrust is very well positioned to capitalize on a tremendous growth opportunity in the cloud security space,” said David ibnAle, founding partner at AVP. “The need for security, automated compliance and policy enforcement for cloud infrastructure and data is critical in almost every industry, and HyTrust is front and center in this field. Gartner’s recent highlighting of the sector as a top security technology for 2017 underscores the relevance of HyTrust’s solutions, and we are extremely excited about the opportunity to back the market leader in this space.”
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