LightCyber, a leading provider of Behavioral Attack Detection solutions, today announced the completion of a $20 million financing round. The round was led by the US-based group, Access Industries, through its Israeli technology investments entity, Claltech, and network security luminary Shlomo Kramer, who joined the LightCyber Board of Directors last year, and whose prior investment has converted into this financing round. Existing investors Battery Ventures, Giliot Capital Partners and Amplify Partners also fully participated in the fundraising.
Kramer is the founder and chief executive officer of Cato Networks and best known as the co-founder of Check Point Software, founder and chief executive officer of Imperva, early investor and former board member of Palo Alto Networks (from 2006 to 2012) and an early investor in Trusteer (acquired by IBM). Access Industries is a U.S.-based group with significant investments in a wide variety of successful technology companies, including Square, Spotify, Beats Music (sold to Apple), Perform, Zalando and Warner Music Group, to name a few. Access Invests in Israeli tech companies primarily through its local entity ClalTech, with Israeli-based investments including Zerto, ironSource, Yotpo and Zooz.
“LightCyber has clearly proven that the Magna Behavioral Attack Detection platform can provide organizations with an unprecedented level of security visibility that can pinpoint active network attackers quickly and accurately and curtail a potential data breach,” said Shlomo Kramer. “The market need and opportunity for the Magna platform is extraordinarily high, so it is important to facilitate rapid global expansion.”
The new funding will be used for fueling further growth in sales and marketing worldwide. LightCyber has been expanding rapidly since its last round of funding in September 2014. Last month the company announced the opening of its EMEA regional headquarters and operations in the UK and DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). It also started its APAC operations earlier this year. LightCyber has grown its sales team by 150 percent over the past three months and plans to grow it by a total of 400 percent by year end. Directing this growth is Claudio Perugini, who earlier this year was appointed senior vice president of worldwide sales. In early 2015, LightCyber established its U.S. headquarters in Silicon Valley, and has been rapidly expanding domestically.
“With major data breaches making headlines nearly every day, traditional security often fails to adequately protect organizations from being breached, and Light Cyber brings a unique solution to solve this issue,” said Daniel Shinar, Claltech’s chief executive officer, who leads Access Industries tech investments in Israel. “We are pleased to join the team led by CEO Gonen Fink and the co-founders Giora Engel and Michael Mumcuoglu, as well as the strong investors supporting the company.”
Following the funding round, Shinar will join the LightCyber Board of Directors.
This year the World Economic Forum listed cybersecurity as one of the greatest threats to businesses around the world1, and Clement’s Worldwide Risk Index cited cybercrime as the number one threat for international business2. Lloyd’s estimated that cyberattacks currently cost businesses $400B per year2, and Juniper Research estimated that the average cost of each data breach will soar to $150 million by 20203. Today, less than 1 percent of enterprises have the capability to find an active attacker at work on their network before theft or damage occurs.
LightCyber provides companies with security visibility into active attacks from cybercriminals and insiders that would otherwise be invisible to traditional security. Organizations must expect that motivated attackers can always circumvent conventional threat prevention infrastructure and penetrate their networks. The LightCyber Magna platform detects these active attackers by their operational activities and curtails a data breach or other consequences.
“We are proud to have the full confidence of our new investors as well as the continued support from our existing investors as we set out in our next phase of growth,” said Gonen Fink, chief executive officer, LightCyber. “The proven value of our Magna platform validates that enterprises need a fundamentally different approach to detect active attackers based on the live behavioral profiling of user accounts, network traffic, and endpoint systems. The strong progress we made during 2015 reflects the efficacy of our solution and the growing market realization that preventative security alone is no longer sufficient.”
About Access Industries & ClalTech
Access Industries is a privately held, U.S. group with global strategic investments. Founded in 1986 by its chairman Len Blavatnik, an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, the group is headquartered in New York. Access invests in industries where it can maximize long-term value by developing regional and global leaders. Its media and technology portfolio includes market leaders such as Warner Music Group, Alibaba, Facebook, Square, Spotify, Perform Group, Rocket Internet, Zalando, Lazada, Deezer, Crowdsurge, Sentient Technologies and many others. Access invests in Israeli tech companies primarily through its local entity ClalTech. Its investments in Israeli technology companies over the past year included Zerto, ironSource, Yotpo and Zooz. ClalTech is supported by a vast network of its parent companies: Access Industries and Clal Industries. For more information, visit www.accessindustries.com and www.claltech.com.
About LightCyber
LightCyber is a leading provider of Behavioral Attack Detection solutions that provide accurate and efficient security visibility into attacks that have slipped through the cracks of traditional security controls. The LightCyber Magna™ platform is the first security product to integrate user, network and endpoint context to provide security visibility into a range of attack activity. Founded in 2012 and led by world-class cyber security experts, the company’s products have been successfully deployed by top-tier customers around the world in industries including the financial, legal, telecom, government, media and technology sectors. For more information, please visit http://www.lightcyber.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
