Cybereason snags second huge investment in six months

After raising $25 million in a Series B round just four months ago, Israeli cyber-security firm on Tuesday announced that it had raked in an additional $59 million in a third funding round – this time led by Japan’s Softbank, which will distribute Cybereason’s cyber-security platform in the Japanese market.

According to the deal, SoftBank and Cybereason will also join forces to build a product that enables Japanese organizations to defend themselves against advanced persistent threats and other sophisticated cyber attacks.

SoftBank, the largest telecommunications company in Japan and the 62nd largest company in the world (based on a composite of sales, profit, assets and market value), is the second major coup for Cybereason this year. In May, the company received a major investment from US defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin invested in Cybereason’s protection system “after they compared our solution against a dozen others from the top industry players,” CEO Lior Div said. The US firm was so impressed with the results they got from Cybereason that they began offering it to their own customers – among them most of the top Fortune 100 companies, and the US federal government. Cybereason is now the security system recommended by LM to its customers for protection from a wide malware and hack attacks.

Cyber-security is a hot commodity these days – for good reason, as hackers and cyber-thieves wreak havoc with corporate and enterprise systems, from banks to movie studios to retailers. But not all solutions are created equal, said Div. “Most of the solutions are very good at what they do – but what they do is very narrow and focused, dealing with only one aspect of the problem.”

It’s the elephant-to-a-blind man problem; what, exactly, are services and technologies looking at when they inspect a system for malware? The IP address origins of attacks? The malware signature? Behavior anomalies (like when a user does something out of the ordinary)? The types of devices that connect to a computer? The user login credentials?

All these are vehicles that are used to conduct cyber-attacks, and there are solutions – good ones, said Div – to mitigate them. But few, if any – other than Cybereason – are able to deal with all of them, and in a simple interface designed for non-techies, said Div. “We don’t expect our customers to be experts in security, which is why we provide them an endpoint solution that they can easily implement to monitor everything that is going on in their system that needs to be dealt with.”

“Over the past year Cybereason has proven its ability to defend the world’s largest, most prestigious and most highly targeted enterprises against ultra-sophisticated cyber attacks,” said Div. “We built our relationship with SoftBank to mirror the success we achieved with Lockheed Martin, which also invested in and built a joint go-to-market plan with us. This model enables us to maintain our agility and focus on innovation while leveraging the credibility, resources and experience that only industry giants bring to the table.”

“We seek to partner with the biggest and brightest players that can offer a unique platform for market expansion and the development of new product offerings. We are excited to work with the excellent team at SoftBank to launch an advanced security solution in Japan, a region that values great technology,” added Div.

“SoftBank works to obtain cutting edge technology and outstanding business models to lead the Information Revolution. Our deployment of the Cybereason platform internally gave us firsthand knowledge of the value it provides, and led to our decision to invest. I’m confident Cybereason and SoftBank’s new product offering will bring a new level of security to Japanese organizations,” said Ken Miyauchi, president and CEO of SoftBank.