MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, Shape Security today revealed it raised $40 million in Series C funding led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) to continue its mission of reinventing web defense. Last month, Shape came out of stealth to unveil its flagship product, the ShapeShifter™ that protects enterprises against the most dangerous cyber attacks. The company will use the new funds to continue to enhance the capabilities of its real-time polymorphic defense and to build a worldwide sales force.

NVP and Sierra Ventures join existing investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Venrock, Google Ventures, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's TomorrowVentures, and Allegis Capital in this round.

'Shape is introducing something completely revolutionary to defend against all types of automated attacks that have been the cause of many high-profile breaches in the last year. The company is changing the economics of web hacking by making it harder for cybercriminals to complete their missions,' said Promod Haque, senior managing partner at NVP. 'With Shape's experienced leadership team and its innovative technology, the economic and social impact they will have on the fight against cyber crime is evident and Norwest Venture Partners is excited to be a part of this movement.'

NVP was an early stage investor in FireEye, which recently acquired Mandiant. Sierra was an investor in Sourcefire, which was acquired by Cisco in 2013. Shape previously raised $26 million in Series A and B funding, bringing its total amount of capital raised to $66 million.

'Shape's technology is disruptive to the entire cybersecurity market,' said Tim Guleri, managing director of Sierra Ventures. 'By preventing the automation which enables malware to function, Shape is able to effectively do with a single technology what others cannot do with a dozen products.'

The ShapeShifter is the industry's first botwall, offering a comprehensive defense against major website attacks. Existing security technologies try to detect attacks based on how they appeared or behaved in the past. This is not effective against adversaries who are constantly changing their code and behaviors to avoid detection. It also does nothing against previously unknown attacks. Instead of guessing about the nature of traffic, the ShapeShifter uses real-time polymorphism to turn websites into constantly moving targets, creating a new foundational defense for user interfaces, which disables attacks from malware, botnets and scripts.

'Since our launch last month, we have been inundated with inquiries from customers all over the world,' said Derek Smith, Shape Security CEO. 'We have worked with early adopters in financial services, healthcare and retail, and our goal with this new funding is to scale quickly to protect every industry.'

Shape Security will be at RSA 2014 in San Francisco. To learn more about real-time polymorphism and the ShapeShifter, visit booth #2001.

About Norwest Venture Partners
Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) is a multi-stage investment firm that has partnered with entrepreneurs to build great businesses for more than 50 years. The firm manages more than $3.7 billion in capital and has funded over 500 companies since inception. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., NVP has subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel. NVP makes early- to late-stage venture and growth equity investments across a wide range of sectors including: technology, information services, business services, financial services, consumer products/services and healthcare. For more information, visit: www.nvp.com.

About Shape Security
Shape Security is led by cybersecurity experts and former executives from Google, the Pentagon, VMware, Cisco, Mozilla and Palo Alto Networks. The company has raised $66M in Series A, B and C funding from Norwest Venture Partners, Sierra Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Venrock, Google Ventures, Wing Venture Partners, Allegis Capital, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's TomorrowVentures and former Symantec CEO Enrique Salem. For more information, visit www.shapesecurity.com.