Veriflow, the network breach and outage prevention company, today announced that it has raised $8.2 million in Series A funding, led by Menlo Ventures along with current investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The company will use the funding to build its sales force, hire new engineering talent and increase marketing efforts to further drive the company's technological innovation and growth as well as industry awareness of mathematical network verification.
'The feedback from customers and analysts indicates the market is ready for a new approach to network breach and outage prevention. Our use of mathematical network verification, grounded in data-plane information, gives customers a proactive approach to identifying vulnerabilities before they are exposed to catastrophic problems,' said James Brear, president and CEO of Veriflow. 'Veriflow provides a comprehensive view of the network that gives administrators the confidence to make changes without fear of damaging critical services and layers of defense. We've spent several years developing our innovative technology, and this funding will enable us to hire key talent, bring our product to market more quickly and expand into new markets.'
Enterprises today are struggling to cope with an accelerating pace of change in network infrastructure. But since management procedures applied to these complex environments are largely manual, change is the key cause of outage incidents and leads to vulnerabilities in network infrastructure. Veriflow bulletproofs networks with sophisticated algorithms that predict all possible network-wide data flow, without waiting for that traffic to occur. This technique, inspired by the field of formal verification, pinpoints vulnerabilities in the realization of network-wide security and resilience policies - such as network segmentation, service availability, and network compliance standards like PCI and HIPAA - to avoid change-induced incidents. Through comprehensive, always-on verification, Veriflow's patented approach provides automated solutions across the multi-billion-dollar networking market to minimize the security vulnerabilities and costly disasters that can result from human factors during network changes.
'Until now, network operators have depended on several different tools to diagnose and mitigate problems occurring in their networks, which often leads to complications and oversights,' said Eric Hanselman, chief analyst at 451 Research. 'Veriflow's approach could provide not only a retrospective view but, more importantly, predictive capabilities for a clear and detailed understanding of complex networks. This platform has the potential to be a validating step in network automation, reducing risk in provisioning.'
Veriflow exited stealth mode in April 2016 with $2.9 million in initial investor funding from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense. The company will spend the second half of 2016 developing its go-to-market strategy, participating in major tech conferences and preparing to launch its flagship product.
'Veriflow has one of the best founding teams I have seen in many years,' said Scott Shenker, co-founder of Nicira and professor of computer science at the University of California - Berkeley. 'Creating this technology took an unusual mix of clever algorithm design, deep understanding of the challenges facing enterprise networks and experienced execution in bringing the product to market.'
The team is led by James Brear, who was previously CEO of Procera until its successful acquisition in August 2015, along with the company's founders, who include Fulbright and Alfred P. Sloan fellows and an ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star awardee.
'Veriflow has pioneered the application of mathematical network verification, which will shake up the network protection landscape,' said Matt Murphy, managing director, Menlo Ventures. 'Today's dynamic infrastructure requires flexibility and agility, yet networks are often opaque and locked down due to operational uncertainty. Veriflow's automated approach predicts, with deep accuracy, how and if network policies will be violated before an incident occurs. Ultimately, everyone who wants a secure and operationally sound environment should 'Veriflow' their network.'
A video interview with Menlo Ventures managing director Matt Murphy and NEA general partner Pete Sonsini can be found here: http://www.veriflow.net/investors
About Veriflow
Veriflow is the first networking company to use formal verification to eliminate change-induced network outages and breaches. The company was created by a team of computer science professors and Ph.D. students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Menlo Ventures, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California. To learn more, visit veriflow.net and follow us on Twitter @veriflowsystems.