Exabeam, a specialist in user behaviour analytics (UBA) for security, has held the closing of a USD25 million financing round to further accelerate the company's rapid growth and continue updating its UBA solution in response to customer demand and industry trends.
Icon Ventures led the Series B investment round. Icon Ventures’ previous security investments include Palo Alto Networks and FireEye two of the most valuable security companies in the world. Exabeam’s previous investors – Aspect Ventures, Investor Shlomo Kramer and Norwest Venture Partners – also participated in the Series B funding, which follows a milestone year of growth for Exabeam and brings total investments in the company to USD35 million.
In the face of growing data breaches, malware and other attacks, cyber security continues to be one of the fastest growing technology markets. UBA is a rapidly expanding segment within the security industry and helps organisations detect, prioritise and respond to modern cyber attacks. Many of the largest recent data breaches employed valid, stolen employee account credentials, and existing security technologies are often unable to detect the use of these stolen credentials. UBA solutions use machine learning and other advanced techniques to distinguish normal and abnormal use of employee account credentials.
“Cyber security continues to be an important market, and UBA can provide significant value to enterprises of all sizes,” says Jeb Miller, general partner at Icon Ventures. “Exabeam is a leader in the UBA market, with a winning product, an excellent customer base and a strong team that has built multiple public security companies before.”
“Both public agencies and private corporations are under non-stop attacks on their sensitive information. We read about new data breaches on a weekly basis,” says Nir Polak (pictured), CEO of Exabeam. “Most of these attacks occur using valid account credentials, and UBA is the only solution today that detects and improves response to these attacks.”
After launching its flagship product early in 2015, Exabeam has enjoyed strong market success, beating both revenue and customer adoption goals. Exabeam appliances are currently monitoring more than 1 million employees and contractors for compromised activity. In addition to continuing its domestic expansion and product development, the company will use the additional funds to drive growth through international expansion. Exabeam is also working with security operations centers to reduce the amount of time spent on tasks that can be automated by machine learning. Exabeam Version 2.0 is the first of its kind to automatically analyse account lockouts (which typically happen when legitimate users repeatedly mistype their passwords) for risk of cyber attack. The issue is traditionally handled by experienced staff, and can consume a significant percentage of security teams’ time.
