CloudPassage, the Software Defined Security (SDSec) company, announced today that it has closed a $25.5 million Series C financing round. The round is led by Shasta Ventures and includes new investors, Meritech Capital Partners and Stephen Luczo, CEO of Seagate, with participation from existing investors, Tenaya Capital, Benchmark Capital and Musea Ventures.

CloudPassage's new financing will be used to expand sales and marketing to meet increasing demand from enterprises seeking to secure their public, private and hybrid cloud environments. The round brings CloudPassage's total capital raised to $53 million. The company is growing rapidly and closed 2013 with the addition of 50 new enterprise customers.

'Security continues to be the number one barrier to cloud adoption, but legacy security tools haven't been able to adapt to address these concerns,' said Jason Pressman, Managing Director of Shasta Ventures. 'Businesses are moving to the cloud at an incredible rate with most forecasts running at 30 percent or higher compound annual growth rates, and security must keep pace. CloudPassage is the only company that is helping organizations make that transition seamlessly, while delivering the security and compliance that they demand.'

Halo®, CloudPassage's security automation platform purpose-built for the cloud, delivers security and compliance for large-scale, distributed environments. Halo was built to be flexible, lightweight and fast to deploy and scale, regardless of the environment. Halo also integrates with leading cloud and security technologies such as VMware, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, RightScale, Splunk and HP ArcSight, among others.

'Cloud security will be a multi-billion dollar market in just a few short years, and CloudPassage has an amazing first-mover advantage,' said Stephen Luczo, CEO of Seagate. 'CloudPassage has developed an innovative platform that is purpose-built for the cloud. Its rapid growth and increasing adoption among large enterprises serves as validation the company has the right approach to cloud security.'

CloudPassage currently protects more than 400 production cloud application deployments, including a number of Fortune 1000 enterprises, and automates security for more than 10,000 new cloud workload instances each month.

'The combination of agility and immediate scalability make cloud infrastructure a powerful strategy that is being rapidly adopted in every industry. These same characteristics create complexity for security and compliance. Halo was built to be as scalable, automated and agile as the cloud itself,' said Carson Sweet, CEO of CloudPassage. 'We're excited to welcome our new investors as we continue to enable enterprise cloud adoption and enter the next phase of our company's growth.'

About CloudPassage
CloudPassage is the leading Software Defined Security (SDSec) company and creator of Halo, the industry's first and only security and compliance platform purpose-built for elastic cloud environments. Halo's patented architecture operates seamlessly across any mix of software-defined data center, public cloud, and even hardware infrastructure. Industry-leading enterprises trust Halo to protect their cloud and software-defined datacenter environments. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, CloudPassage is backed by Benchmark Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, Tenaya Capital, Shasta Ventures, Musea Ventures and other leading investors. For more information, please visit http://www.cloudpassage.com