Today we are announcing that Venafi has received $39M in new funding from strategic investors: Intel Capital, Silver Lake Waterman, QuestMark Partners, Foundation Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, and Mercato Partners. These are a mix of new and existing investors who believe in and are passionate about the Venafi vision and support our mission to restore trust online by protecting the Global 5000 as the Immune System for the Internet.
Over the past 10 years, enterprises have become more complex and connected, and their security challenges have grown with them. The bad guys are ahead in this race. But Venafi helps enterprises defend against the bad guys and has continued to grow, from a 14-person startup to an international organization working from development centers and offices around the world.
Today, Venafi protects
- 4 of the top 5 U.S. banks
- 8 of the top 10 U.S. health insurance companies
- 4 of the top 7 U.S. retailers
All of whom rely on Venafi as mission-critical security to protect their keys and certificates from misuse. We are their immune system for their cyber realm.
We pioneered the first and only technology to secure keys and certificates—the foundation of all cybersecurity—and protect them from bad guys, and we have continued to evolve as the market leader. We’ve also developed the world’s largest talent of subject matter experts who know how attackers are going after keys and certificates within the Global 5000. Their expertise lets us understand how the bad guys use keys and certificates to gain trusted status and steal valuable data without detection, and how to protect against those threats.
We’ve built a technology stack that secures keys and certificates, whether in the cloud, on mobile devices, inside the firewall and/or in the Internet of Things. During the last 12 months, the most significant vulnerabilities and breaches, including Heartbleed, POODLE, Shellshock, and the attacks on Sony Pictures and others, demonstrate how unsecured keys and certificates provide the trusted status cybercriminals need to go undetected for long periods. Once authenticated with a stolen or forged key or certificate, the bad guys can further hide their activities by encrypting the malware they use against their targets and data they want to steal and exfiltrate from them.
The new funding allows us to accelerate development of the Venafi Trust Protection Platform™ to better support our fast growing customer base worldwide. The investment also demonstrates our investors’ understanding of the size of the problem and their commitment to helping solve it for the Global 5000. You can get perspective from Intel Capital’s Ken Elefant, who blogged about the funding announcement in a new posting “Why Intel Capital Believes in Securing the Foundation of Trust.”
We’ve also built an incredible leadership team with the vision and expertise to make a lasting impact on how the world approaches cybersecurity. And, like our leadership team, our current investors see that the world is changing. They know that the way that we used to think about Internet security and layering defenses isn’t enough anymore, and they want to be alongside Venafi as we develop new ways to secure and protect global enterprises.
Venafi is the Immune System for the Internet. Just as humans have evolved a highly effective immune system that is constantly working to establish what is “self” and trusted, and what is “not self” and dangerous, this too must be applied to security. The human body tags all cells that belong. The human immune system continuously finds those that are not tagged and disables them. The Internet uses keys and certificates to tag what belongs. But before Venafi, there was no immune system to find those that don’t belong and disable them. This fundamental missing piece—the equivalent of an immune system—has allowed the bad guys to do amazing damage. Modern security solutions must be adaptive and responsive. They must operate like a living organism, always scanning for new threats and attacks, detecting that which doesn’t belong, and responding to keep the Internet and our intellectual property (IP) safe.
Unfortunately, as Gartner says, “We live in a world without trust,” and haven’t had an effective way to defend against a new generation of cyber attacks—until now. With Venafi as the Immune System for the Internet—continually identifying what keys and certificates are trusted and those that aren’t—we can secure and protect Global 5000 organizations from the most prevalent attacks today—attacks on the very trust provided by keys and certificates. From stopping certificate-based outages to enabling SSL inspection, Venafi creates an ever-evolving, intelligent response that protects your network, business, and brand—and by doing so, we’re able to protect e-commerce, intellectual property, and sensitive data that underlays all the largest enterprise organizations in operation today.
It’s an enormous task, but one that we meet enthusiastically. We’ll utilize this new investment to expand the Immune System, grow into new global markets, and to help Global 5000 enterprises continue to fight attacks on trust that are increasing exponentially each day.
Enterprises can no longer expect static defense mechanisms to protect them from the dynamic attacks that are launched against us every day. We must evolve. We must get smarter and stronger. We must implement an Immune System for the Internet—and we must do it now.