Cylance, Inc., the first next-generation endpoint protection company to successfully apply artificial intelligence to predictively identify and stop cyber attacks before they ever execute, announced on Tuesday that it has closed more than $42 million in Series C funding. Led by DFJ Growth, the round includes investments from KKR, Dell Ventures, Capital One Ventures and TenEleven Ventures. Cylance joins DFJ Growth portfolio companies Box, Tesla Motors and SpaceX on its growth trajectory. Mark Bailey, former senior Symantec executive and DFJ Growth co-founder and managing director, will join Cylance's board of directors.
Already a profitable technology company, Cylance's Fortune 500 customer list includes 20 of the top Energy and Oil & Gas companies, 34 of the top Healthcare companies, 43 of the top Bank and Financial Services companies and 46 of the top High-Tech companies in the world. Excitement around Cylance comes from both its groundbreaking technology and its explosive and unprecedented sales growth; outperforming cybersecurity juggernauts like Palo Alto Networks (PANW) and FireEye (FEYE) in their startup years. Growing more than 400 percent year-over-year, and selling to more than 18 verticals every quarter, the $42 million investment will be used to accelerate sales and marketing, as well as power global business expansion. The Series C round also includes new strategic investors Thomvest and DraperNexus, in addition to previous investors Blackstone, Fairhaven Capital and Khosla Ventures.
'Cyber attackers are relentless and highly adaptive in their efforts to overwhelm organizations. Cylance offers the biggest leap forward in endpoint protection since the original introduction of antivirus products roughly 25 years ago,' said Mark Bailey, of DFJ Growth. 'Today's most advanced threats are highly targeted and engineered specifically to avoid detection by signature-based products. Cylance offers the easiest-to-deploy, next generation solution to defend against these advanced threats. In conversations with numerous customers and distributors, we have been very impressed with the rave reviews of both the Cylance product and team. By using sophisticated machine learning models, Cylance helps customers prevent attacks from the most advanced cyber threats. The company's hypergrowth is further evidence of the efficacy and scalability of their solutions.'
As traditional endpoint security and the underlying fundamental efficacy of signature-based detection erode, Cylance's proactive, pre-execution artificial intelligence approach predicts the behavior of cyber attacks and stops them before needing to react to intrusions. The approach greatly reduces the cost and impact of an attack, unlike 'wait-and-see' detect-and-respond based solutions that work after the breach has long begun, and has caused irreversible damage.
Since its introduction just over one year ago, CylancePROTECT has been rapidly embraced by the market with unprecedented customer deployment at scale. The company's product growth is nothing short of staggering. In addition, Cylance's professional services team has responded to some of the largest data breaches reported over the past year, using CylancePROTECT to identify and contain zero day and advanced attacks against businesses and government agencies globally with incident response and forensics services. This reinforces Cylance as one of the world's leading trusted security advisors.
'We founded Cylance three years ago with the goal of reinventing endpoint security,' said Cylance CEO and former McAfee Global CTO, Stuart McClure. 'We are the first company to successfully use math and machine learning to predict malicious files without relying on any existing techniques including signatures, whitelisting, heuristics, behavioral or sandboxing. This means we can proactively prevent the most dangerous new zero day threats -- all pre-execution. With CylancePROTECT, we have the ability to affect enterprise defenses in a dramatic, revolutionary and truly disruptive way. For us, it's not just about a more effective endpoint defense, it's about eroding the advantage of the attackers' ability to evade -- and turning the tide back in favor of the defender.'
Public, unbiased testing of CylancePROTECT shows that it has unparalleled efficacy, blocking more than 99 percent of all threats by volume, which is double or triple the rates of traditional signature-based antivirus, and endpoint detect-and-respond products. This fundamentally new approach automatically evolves, learning how to detect existing and mutating threats through advanced artificial intelligence, all without updates or cloud lookups.
'We have been incredibly impressed by the strength of the Cylance team, their vision, and their ability to execute on a bold new approach to threat detection, and we're not alone in that assessment based on the company's rapid growth and market adoption,' said Adam Boutin of Capital One Ventures. 'We're thrilled to partner in helping Cylance bring their vision to life.'
'The use of math and machine learning in enterprise security has tremendous potential. Cylance brings a unique methodology and lens to the market, which we are eager to watch as IT infrastructures and threats continue to evolve,' said Tony Spinelli, Chief Information Security Officer at Capital One.
'Cylance's simplicity and efficacy is changing the game with their endpoint protection technology, making it possible to remove unnecessary endpoint layers, and even some network layers,' says Jay Leek, Global CISO for Blackstone. 'We are extremely pleased with our Cylance partnership. Over the past 18 months, Cylance has emerged to be our primary defense to prevent advanced threats, not only within Blackstone but across many of our portfolio companies.'
'KKR invests in transformative technology, and Cylance impresses us with their hypergrowth, powerful artificial intelligence platform, significant installed customer base and rapidly growing sales pipeline,' said Herald Chen, co-head of TMT at KKR.
About Cylance, Inc.
Cylance is the first company to apply artificial intelligence, algorithmic science and machine learning to cybersecurity and improve the way companies, governments and end users proactively solve the world's most difficult security problems. Using a breakthrough mathematical process, Cylance quickly and accurately identifies what is safe and what is a threat, expanding beyond what is in a blacklist or whitelist. By coupling sophisticated math and machine learning with a unique understanding of a hacker's mentality, Cylance provides the technology and services that are predictive and preventive against advanced threats. For more information, visit: www.cylance.com.
About DFJ
DFJ is a venture capital firm that partners with extraordinary entrepreneurs who set out to change the world. Since 1985, DFJ's core funds have raised $4 billion, which has been deployed in more than 300 portfolio investments, including Baidu, Box, Foursquare, Skype, SolarCity, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Twitter, Tumblr and Yammer. DFJ works with companies at seed, early and growth stages, with the goal of creating iconic and lasting businesses. DFJ invests in emerging markets including consumer, enterprise, and disruptive technologies. Learn more at dfj.com.