Stealthy Mobile Security Startup Bluebox Launches With $9.5M Led by Andreessen Horowitz

Bluebox Launches with $9.5 Million in Funding Led by Andreessen Horowitz; Andreas Bechtolsheim and Scott Weiss Join Board of Directors

San Francisco, California-based mobile security startup Bluebox unveiled itself to the public today, along with a fresh round of funding from one of the country’s leading venture capital firms. With the goal to develop the next evolution in enterprise security technology, Bluebox today announced it has closed a $9.5 million Series A financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Founded by a young, yet experienced team of entrepreneurs with a successful track record, co-founder Caleb Sima will serve as the company’s CEO. Interestingly, Sima had been serving as an “Entrepreneur in Residence” at Andreessen Horowitz prior to launching the new company. Sima served as Chief Technology Officer for HP’s Application Security Center after joining the company as a result of HP’s acquisition of SPI Dynamics in 2007, a company he co-founded and as CTO oversaw development of WebInspect – a Web application security testing tool. Prior to co-founding SPI Dynamics in early 2000, Caleb worked for Internet Security Systems’ elite X-Force R&D team and as a Security Engineer for S1 Corporation. Sima also briefly served as CEO of Armorize, a Web malware and source code analysis firm, during 2010-2011.

The company did not say how it plans to put the fresh injection of cash to use, but it’s fairly obvious that it will be put toward hiring a top team of security and development experts and brining its first product or service to market.

While the startup is remaining tight-lipped on the details on the product or service they are developing, it’s clear that the focus is mobile security.

“Our target is to solve one of the toughest challenges in security today and tomorrow which is mobile security,” Sima told SecurityWeek. “We are in the process of building a great team to bring a very unique solution to market that no one has seen today. Mobile growth is skyrocketing and security is a critical barrier for full adoption.”

Co-founder Adam Ely was previously CISO of the Heroku business unit at salesforce.com. Prior to salesforce.com, Adam led security operations, application security, and compliance for TiVo. Before TiVo, he led security functions within The Walt Disney Company.

“Enterprise security on mobile is an unsolved problem, and, frankly, is in need of innovation,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and one of the first investors in Google. “Bluebox is developing a solution that will change the way enterprises think of how to successfully and seamlessly protect their data.”

“This is the most amazing security team that I’ve seen in a long time,” said Scott Weiss, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “They are going after one of the hardest problems that companies face and where incumbents have floundered.” Weiss is no stranger to the security world, and was co-founder and former CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007 for $850 Million. 

Additional investors participating in the round include Andreas Bechtolsheim, SV Angel, Ram Shriram, board member of Google and one of its first investors, and Brian Cohen, former CEO of SPI Dynamics. Bechtolsheim and Weiss will join the company’s board of directors.