Security analytics firm Skybox announced Wednesday that it has secured $150 million growth equity comprising $100 million from CVC Capital Partners’ Growth Fund (CVC Growth), and $50 million from Pantheon. This more than doubles existing investment in the firm, which now stands at around $280 million. It received $96 million from Providence Strategic Growth (PSG) in February 2016.
Skybox was originally founded in 2002 in Jerusalem, Israel, by Gidi Cohen and Eran Reshef. It is now headquartered in San Jose, California, but with its development center in Herzliya Pituach in the Tel Aviv District of Israel.
Skybox offers cybersecurity management software that provides visibility into its customers’ unique attack surface. It uses analytics to detect and prioritize risk exposure, and provides recommendations on how to address those exposures. Customers are large Global 5000 organizations and financial institutions, and government agencies; and include six of the top 10 global banks, 10 global telecommunications firms, five of the world’s largest consumer goods manufacturers and 10 of the largest energy providers globally.
The combination of increasingly sophisticated attackers from both cybercriminal gangs and state-sponsored attacks, combined with the more complex IT infrastructures evolving from accelerating digital transformation provides the backdrop for Skybox. In the first half of 2017, Skybox showed a 62 percent increase in sales and 59 percent increase in product transactions compared to the same period last year (January 1 – June 30).
“Enterprises, governments… everyone is either embarking on or going through massive digital transformation, and this means new challenges for security because the attack surface of these organizations is growing more complex,” said Cohen. “We’ve been consistently evolving our technology to meet those challenges. With this investment, we’ll accelerate that innovation, focusing on some of the most critical areas, such as security management for the cloud and the OT networks that control critical infrastructure.”
“Skybox’s track record is impressive and there is clear demand for their solutions,” said Jason Glass, senior managing director of CVC Growth Partners. “It is a true leader in cybersecurity management, helping organizations better protect themselves and become more efficient.”
Skybox announced, “This round of funding will enable an accelerated investment in sales and marketing, customer care and R&D. It will also be used for potential M&A activity, to capitalize on the approximately $10 billion market opportunity in cybersecurity management.”
However, in an interview with the Israeli business publication Globes, CEO Cohen also indicated that some of the money would be used to buy out existing investors. “As well as injecting new capital into the company, some of the existing investors in Skybox, including employees, have sold their holdings.” He added, “The buying of shares was a significant part of this financing round.”
The company said it has a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 percent, and positive cash flow between 2014 and 2016.
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Kevin Townsend is a Senior Contributor at SecurityWeek. He has been writing about high tech issues since before the birth of Microsoft. For the last 15 years he has specialized in information security; and has had many thousands of articles published in dozens of different magazines – from The Times and the Financial Times to current and long-gone computer magazines.
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