Dragos Inc., one of Greater Baltimore’s biggest cybersecurity firms, announced Thursday that it has raised $200 million in Series D funding.
This latest round of fundraising puts the Hanover-based startup's valuation at $1.7 billion. It appears to be the biggest fundraising haul for a Maryland cybersecurity company since 2015.
Koch Industries and BlackRock led the funding round, which also had investments from Emerson, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Allegis Cyber, Canaan, DataTribe, Energy Impact Partners, National Grid Partners, Schweitzer Engineering Labs, Global Reserve Group, and Rockwell Automation, according to a release.
Founded in 2016, Dragos specializes in providing threat detection and response services for customers operating in industries such as electric, oil and gas, manufacturing, mining and transportation.
Dragos said in the release that it plans to use the new funds “to accelerate the company’s global expansion and support customers in key growth markets across diverse industries including electric, oil and gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, water and manufacturing.”
The funding round comes less than a year after Dragos raised $110 million in Series C funds. In March, the company opened its first international office — a 4,758-square foot site in Melbourne, Australia. Dragos, which has about 100 employees in the greater Baltimore area, has previously announced plans to expand to the United Kingdom and Dubai. Dragos is backed by $358 million in funding to date.
“Executives around the world from corporate leadership to government officials have continued to note the criticality of protecting OT (operational technology) and the need to do so with OT specific approaches,” Dragos CEO Robert M. Lee said in a statement. “The risks are not just in cyberattacks, though those are becoming more numerous and aggressive, but also in ensuring the appropriate insights into (industrial control systems)/OT environments to maintain resilience as our world’s infrastructures and industrial automation environments become more connected and more complex.”
The $200 million in funding appears to be the biggest haul for a Maryland cybersecurity company since 2015, when Tenable raised $250 million before going public a few years later. The funding raise from Dragos is the latest mega-deal in what is shaping up to be a record-breaking venture capital year for Maryland and Baltimore. Other companies that have raised over $100 million rounds this year include Columbia email delivery firm SparkPost's $180 million round, Baltimore cancer diagnostics firm Personal Genome Diagnostics (PGDx)'s $103 million round and a $100 million round for another Baltimore cancer diagnostics firm, Delfi Diagnostics.
