C5 Capital, a cybersecurity-focused venture capital firm, has led a $78m Series B investment in IronNet Cybersecurity.
The venture capital investor was joined by existing investor ForgePoint Capital (formerly known as Trident Capital Cybersecurity) and Kleiner Perkins, taking the company’s total funding to $110.5m to date.
IronNet, founded by Keith Alexander, the former Director of the National Security Agency and Founding Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, and a distinguished team of national security and private sector cyber leaders. The company, which is focused on building products to reduce cyber risk and protect nations and industries from the most advanced cyber threat actors, provides IronDome and IronDefense.
Its IronDefense product provides behavioral detection, visibility, risk prioritisation, and packet level threat hunting through an intuitive user interface to alert organisations when their environment is at risk. The product identifies a range of malicious activity with ‘greater confidence than competitor products’ and it does so on a platform designed for enterprise-scale deployment according to the company.
While its IronDome technology provides machine speed sharing of events to deliver threat insights and situational awareness without human involvement. This enables visibility of industry-wide malicious activity, allowing member companies to identify stealthy activity and industry targeted campaigns that would be difficult to identify by any single company working in isolation.
“It is apparent to all of us that the threats enterprises face will continue to evolve in a way that traditional solutions are not able to cope,” said Marcos Battisti, managing partner of C5 Capital. “IronNet’s platform is the only scalable solution in the market providing a truly holistic protection to today’s constant and ever-changing attacks.”
IronNet will use the money to accelerate its efforts and to stand up additional IronDome collective defense systems in the financial and healthcare sectors, as well to expand internationally in key areas on the front lines of the cyber threat, including Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Earlier this year, C5 Capital, a UK-based fund investing purely in the cybersecurity sector, marked its first portfolio sale by offloading Balabit to One Identity. Based in Budapest, Hungary, Balabit is a provider of privileged access management (PAM), privileged account analytics and log management solutions that help businesses reduce the risk of data breaches associated with privileged accounts.
The investment firm’s portfolio currently includes hybrid storage platform Reduxio, IT network infrastructure business ITC Secure Networking, identity governance and administration company Omada, and magnetic detection business Metrasens.
ForgePoint Capital is a $300m fund exclusively investing in cybersecurity companies. The firm’s portfolio companies include 4iQ, Attivo, Appthority, Bayshore Networks, BehavioSec, CyberCube Analytics, ID Experts, Prevoty, and ReversingLabs.
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