News
LightCyber Raises $20M to Meet Growing Global Demand for Behavioural Attack Detection Solutions
June 2016 by Marc Jacob
LightCyber announced the completion of a $20 million financing round. The round was led by the U.S.-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.
The new funding will be used for fuelling 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 U.K. 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.
Following the funding round, Shinar will join the LightCyber Board of Directors.
Lloyd’s estimated that cyberattacks currently cost businesses $400B per year1, and Juniper Research estimated that the average cost of each data breach will soar to $150 million by 20202. 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. Organisations 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.
