Tech

AlienVault secures $52m in new funding round

The investment is destined for the expansion of security management and threat detection platforms.

Written by Charlie Osborne, Contributing Writer Aug. 19, 2015 at 7:06 a.m. PT

AlienVault has raised $52 million in a fresh round of funding, bringing total investment to roughly $116 million.

Announced on Wednesday, the cybersecurity firm said the Series E funding round was led by new investor Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), also included existing investors Trident Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and GGV Capital. AlienVault plans to use the funding to improve the scale of the firm's global sales strategy and to push additional investment in AlienVault's Unified Security Management (USM) platform.

Open Threat Exchange (OTX), AlienVault's open threat intelligence community platform, will also benefit from the increase in funding.

The latest wave of investment brings AlienVault's total funding to approximately $116 million. As part of the funding deal, General Partner at IVP Steve Harrick will be joining the board of directors as an observer.

AlienVault CEO Barmak Meftah told TechCrunch the company is leaning towards the idea of an initial public offering (IPO), as the security firm is "scratching the surface" of how big they can be. Meftah would not commit to an IPO or specific date -- but the investment certainly cannot hurt the firm's future goals.

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Steve Harrick, General Partner at IVP commented:

"AlienVault offers organizations a unique solution to protect their sensitive data and core infrastructure. We were especially impressed by the company's strong executive team and board, their practical approach to the market and their enthusiastic and devoted customers."

The announcement was made following the appointment of former Verisign and Neustar executive Brian Robs as the new AlienVault chief financial officer.

In May, AlienVault patched a number of vulnerabilities within the company's OSSIM and USM platforms, used by thousands of security professionals worldwide as an event management system. The weaknesses in the system were exploitable simply by uploading a malicious NBE file -- and could be used to conduct XSS, SQLi, and command execution attacks.