Cybersecurity startup Illumio announced on Tuesday that it has closed a massive $100 million Series C financing round, bringing the total raised by the company to more than $142 million in just over two years.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company is on a mission to secure modern data centers that have been using a static security model and transforming them to a model using a dynamic approach that leverages context and relationship data to automatically program a security policy.
Not only has the company raised an impressive level of funding, it has convinced an impressive list of top tier venture firms and well known Silicon Valley tech veterans to get in on the funding.
Participating in the round are new investors BlackRock Funds and Accel Partners, joined by existing venture investors Formation 8, Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. Also participating are Microsoft Chairman John W. Thompson, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang.
Illumio said the funding would be used to support increasing demand for its Adaptive Security Platform (ASP), invest in R&D to drive additional platform expansion, grow its sales and marketing efforts, and fuel international expansion.
By learning the relationships among application workloads, Illumio’s ASP platform can program the optimal security policy for every workload and adapt continuously to set an appropriate security policy, even as applications change.
According to the company, its platform takes away the need for manual intervention and manages enforcement across applications, workloads and processes as they are provisioned, operated and moved in any data center or private and public cloud infrastructure.
“We put security in places that were traditionally difficult,” PJ Kirner, CTO and Founder of Illumio explained in a blog post. “We can now see into places that were previously hidden. This is much like having a matrix of bodyguards in every room of a hotel, instead of just the front-door security—it is a collective all working together under one set of directives.”
Since emerging from stealth mode approximately five months ago, the company has signed multiple Fortune 500 customers including Morgan Stanley and NTT.
The technology can be deployed to run on any platform, including bare-metal servers and virtual machines, and works in any environment, including enterprise data center, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack.
In addition to announcing the large round of funding, Illumio announced new capabilities in its platform, which extends its policy model to the F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager and NGINX product lines, the most popular enterprise and open source load balancers in the market.
Specifically, the integration of Illumio’s ASP with F5 BIG-IP LTM enables dynamic programming of ACLs on the F5 BIG-IP based on application changes.
“Effectively the load balancer will become an additional point of enforcement behind the perimeter,” Illumio explained. “This complements Illumio security capabilities at the workload level and gives enterprise security teams the power to apply continuous, automated security across the widest range of applications and workloads in any data center or public and private cloud.”
