Sequoia Capital leads $10M round in Seculert

Israeli and SF-based cloud-based security startup gets Series B

In the old media days, most prominent journalists worked at large news organizations. Media was disseminated through three major networks and a few big national papers. They were the eyes and ears of the world. Fast forward, and there's thousands of bloggers and citizen journalists all providing different perspectives and uncovering more news than any media organization ever could on its own.  

In like vein, the cloud-based era of software has made it challenging for corporations to rely on their silo-like architectures to fend off today's software hackers, who are invading corporate walls and unleashing all sorts of havoc, like advanced malware attacks. Traditional security measures aren't as effective in detecting and defending corporate IT systems as they once used to be. 

That's changing with today's next-generation security systems, such as Seculert,  that help to provide the eyes and ears inside and outside corporate networks, enabling corporations to get a much broader view of potential security breaches. 

Sequoia Capital is leading a $10 million investment in the Israeli-based startup, which provides cloud-based malware detection and persistent security threats for large corporations. Existing investor Norwest Venture Partners also participated. All told, Seculert has now raised $16 million, which includes a seed round by YL Ventures, which invested the first money into Seculert back at the end of 2010 and provided much of the nurturing and guidance to help get the startup off the ground.  

"We’ve been able to identify devices inside and outside the corporate network that are being affected by hackers without installing on premise," said Dudi Malot, founder and CEO of Seculert. Additionally, Seculert can "identify persisten attacks" and eventually be plugged into a corporation's existing infrastructure/gateways without needing to replace them, but rather augment them, he explained.

Seculert currently has dozens of customers, which pay an annual subscription fee of several thousand dollars a month to up to $10,000 a month. For that amount, Seculert uses big data analytics to look at historical traffic data which helps to identify out of the ordinary traffic flows and ultimately potential threats. 

(Image source: loonwatch)