San Francisco, CA-based attack surface management firm RiskIQ has raised $15 million in a Series D funding round led by National Grid Partners (NGP). NGP is the venture and innovation arm of the British multinational utility company National Grid plc.
RiskIQ monitors the attack surface from outside of the firewall, with services including vulnerability management, application security and penetration testing. These services are used by more than 6,000 organizations worldwide, including 30% of the Fortune 500. After a decade of mapping the internet, RiskIQ allows its customers to discover and inventory their digital attack surface, including IoT assets, third-party code, internet-exposed services, and mobile applications.
While additional funding is always valuable, in this instance the strategic relationship with an important utility firm may be even more important to RiskIQ’s future. National Grid is already a RiskIQ customer. Lisa Lambert, who is both president of NGP and chief technology and innovation officer at National Grid, explained that her “cyber threat analysts use RiskIQ regularly to enrich and identify incoming threats.”
From her investment standpoint, she added, “At NGP, we seek to partner with and invest in high growth companies that are strategic to National Grid. RiskIQ is a category leader in Attack Surface Management, with impressive technology and growth.”
In addition to the financial investment, NGP will provide ongoing strategic and tactical advice and guidance to RiskIQ as it seeks to expand deeper into the infrastructure, manufacturing and utility markets. In helping to make RiskIQ even more useful within its own utility company, RiskIQ will emerge with a deeper understanding of the needs of critical infrastructure organizations — which are now likely to emerge as an important new target for the firm.
This funding, confirms the firm, will enable RiskIQ to bring its attack surface management, threat detection, and unique threat hunting capabilities to critical infrastructure industries, which face a host of unique security challenges entering the new decade.
RiskIQ was founded in 2009 by Brad Byrd (now COO and president at Salsita Software), Chris Kiernan, David Pon, and Elias Manousos (CEO). It raised $25 million in a Series B funding round in May 2014, followed by a $30.5 million Series C round in November 2016 — bringing the total raised to date to $80.5 million.
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