Venafi, a Salt Lake City, Utah-based provider of enterprise key and certificate management solutions, today announced that it has received $39 million in additional funding.
According to the company, the new funds will be used to accelerate development of its products and support customer growth.
The hefty cash injection is a Series F round and brings the total funding raised to-date by the company to $101 million.
The company offers a portfolio of software and services designed to help enterprise customers manage digital certificates and encryption keys—mainly to help ensure they are not abused by malicious actors in attacks.
Venafi’s solutions help customers keep an eye on their trust-based assets and assess which keys and certificates are trusted, protect those that should be trusted, and has the ability to fix or block those that aren’t.
The funding round was led by QuestMark Partners and other new investors Intel Capital and Silver Lake Partners, as well as existing investors.
“From online banking and mobile applications to the Internet of Things, everything IP-based relies upon a key and certificate to create a trusted connection,” Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi, said in a statement.
While trust based attacks are not uncommon, a recent example is the creators of Duqu 2.0, who used a stolen certificate in their highly advanced attacks as part of a bid to stay stealthy, according to Kaspersky Lab. In this case, the attackers used a valid digital signature from Foxconn Technology Group, which manufactures electronics for a wide range of companies, including Apple and BlackBerry.
In December 2013 Venafi launched what it calls a mobile device “kill switch” which gives IT security teams the ability to instantly cut off mobile access to applications and networks when digital certificates are suspected of being used for malicious purposes.
Venafi counts four of the top five US banks, eight of the top US 10 health insurance companies and four of the top seven US retailers as customers.
