Procurement News Notice |
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| PNN | 4901 |
| Work Detail | Fast-growing LogRhythm is expected to announce Tuesday that it raised another $50 million from investors to speed up its global expansion to help large companies fight cyber attacks. The new round was led by Riverwood Capital Management, which led the $40 million round two years ago. Riverwood, the largest shareholder, is a big believer that the Boulder cybersecurity firm has a lot of growth ahead, said Jeff Parks, founding partner of Riverwood Capital. “In my world, when you’ve got a winner on your hands and the capital to put into the space, you take it,” Parks said. “The market they address is quite sizable and growing and the company is very well-positioned. It really is one of the top technology companies in the Denver-Boulder area.” LogRhythm, which started in 2003, collects data from a corporation’s existing security programs and analyzes the data into a user-friendly dashboard that prioritizes threats. That appeals to very large companies with aging systems, and to mid-sized companies that don’t have a large security staff monitoring — and understanding — every single intrusion. While LogRhythm has grown rapidly — it has doubled its staff in two years to 600 people— the time wasn’t quite right to go public, CEO Andy Grolnick said. “We saw an opportunity to double down on growth and our presence worldwide. That’s why we’re pursuing this route,” Grolnick said. “There’s a lot of demand and growth (for cybersecurity solutions) but the next layer of the onion, there’s a real shift going on as organizations really recognize the need to get investment on more of a prevention approach and invest more on analytics-based technology. For LogRhythm, that’s our wheelhouse.” The threat detection and response market is projected to reach $23 billion in spending by 2020, according to market researcher Gartner. The new funding lets LogRhythm grow its team in Europe and with a new investor in Asia, it plans to expand in those regions. It also lets the company remain independent in a competitive field that includes IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel. This security niche is specifically known as SIEM, short for security information and event management. The potential growth for the space had the three giants buying SIEMs in recent years with HPE acquiring ArcSight for $1.5 billion in 2010, IBM buying Q1 Labs in 2011 and Intel’s McAfee group buying NitroSecurity in 2011. Still, the smaller LogRhythm is a major contender for any large business user when it comes to investing in cybersecurity management, said Scott Crawford, an information security analyst at 451 Research. “LogRhythm is often on an enterprise’s shortlist,” Crawford said. “One of the things that really stands out about LogRhythm is the user experience. It’s fairly intuitive and easily adapted to the customers’ environment.” And by staying independent, he added, “LogRhythm has been able to stay fairly agile.” Crawford said that LogRhythm added features faster than the big rivals, including Elasticsearch, which looks for unknown threats instead of the typical practice of looking for threats based on rules. LogRhythm also “embraced user-behavior analytics earlier than some of the other SIEM competitors,” Crawford added. This alerts a system to a permitted user doing something not normal for that user, which could indicate the person was phished and inadvertently shared a user name and password with a hacker. With the latest round, LogRhythm has raised $122 million to date from investors, which also include EDBI, the dedicated investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board. Other investors in the round include Adams Street Partners, Siemens Venture Capital, Delta-v Capital, members of the LogRhythm management team, Exclusive Ventures and Silver Lake Waterman. |
| Country | United States , Northern America |
| Industry | Cyber Security |
| Entry Date | 03 Sep 2016 |
| Source | http://www.denverpost.com/2016/08/30/logrhythms-user-friendly-approach-to-cybersecurity-attracts-50-million/ |
