Phantom, a cybersecurity startup that has developed a community-powered security automation and orchestration platform, announced that it has raised $13.5 million in a Series B funding round led by iconic Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins.
The latest round brings Phantom’s total funding raised to-date by the company to more than $23 million.
According to the company, the additional cash injection will be used to accelerate growth in sales, marketing, and engineering.
As SecurityWeek columnist Avi Chesla voiced in a recent column, “defenders should be able to accelerate the pace of innovation of security solutions – and have the ability to share security orchestration models.” This is something Phantom is trying to enable via its community-powered platform.
“The Phantom platform automates and orchestrates security operations enabling analysts to achieve in seconds what may normally take hours or days to accomplish manually,” Phantom explains. “Phantom Apps drive this by acting as the connective tissue to integrate the dozens of discrete point products that enterprises have deployed to secure their environment.”
The company says that it currently has more than 100 of the “apps” which integrate with various security products, including reputation services, endpoint technologies, sandboxes, firewalls, and mobile, virtual and cloud-based security solutions. These apps are available for a wide range of security tools from partners including Cisco, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, RSA Security, Symantec, Splunk, HPE, IBM and others. In cases where a Phantom App is not yet available, the company says that its community-powered approach supports rapid development and sharing.
“Security teams are suffocating from the growing volume and velocity of security alerts,” said Ted Schlein, general partner, Kleiner Perkins. “Lack of integration between point products and a shortage of skilled security professionals only exacerbates the problem and makes it all but impossible to respond. Most enterprises are looking at security automation and orchestration to address these challenges. Phantom’s open and extensible platform is the clear leader in this emerging market.”
“By providing an open platform we’ve given people building blocks to automate an almost infinite number of security use cases,” said Phantom Founder & CEO Oliver Friedrichs. “We’re seeing creative Apps that connect services and technologies we had never considered. Engineers in the world’s largest commercial enterprises and government agencies use our platform and extend it to solve some very complex problems.”
Existing investors TechOperators Venture Capital, Blackstone, Foundation Capital, In-Q-Tel, Rein Capital, Zach Nelson, and John W. Thompson also participated in the Series B round.
Last month the company was awarded a U.S. Patent for “Security action verification in a computing network,” explained by the company as systems, methods, and software for validating security actions before they are implemented in a computing network.