You might call 2014 the year of the breach. Between Apple’s issue with iCloud, JPMorgan Chase, AOL and Yahoo all suffering high-profile attacks and UPS, Neiman Marcus and Michael all being hit with malware, one thing was clear: Even big brands are vulnerable.
Now, Boston-based cybersecurity firm Rapid7 has raised $30 million in new funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Technology Crossover Ventures, both ongoing investors. That brings the company, considered a potential contender for an initial public offering, to $89 million in total funding since its launch in 2000.
The company's new valuation wasn't disclosed, but a spokesman confirmed that this was an "up" round for Rapid7 (i.e., it came with a higher valuation than the company received in connection with its last round, of $50 million, in 2011).
This investment caps a big 2014 for Rapid7, which this year added new customers in the Fortune 1000 and grew to 3,000 customers overall, across 78 countries.
Ben Nye, managing director of Bain Capital Ventures, said Rapid7’s IT security analytics help customers to not only better respond to potential threats, but also understand them. He also pointed to the company’s impressive growth, which he said suggests a “compelling future.”
New products
The firm attributes some of its growth to the launch of the UserInsight product about a year ago. The product can identify and investigate attacks involving user impersonation, lateral attacker movement and compromised credentials - which happened to be the number one attack vector for data breaches in 2013, according to the 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. Rapid7 claims that the newly added features to their security solution, like the interactive incident timeline, help customers to analyze and respond to attacks as much as five to 10 times faster.
“We believe companies can be successful in security without slowing down their business,” said Corey Thomas, president and CEO of Rapid7, in a news release.
The new funding will let the company "capitalize on the tremendous growth and success we have seen this year by accelerating our leadership, market share, and development in intruder analytics and services," Thomas said.
Such developments could be crucial going forward, as Thomas noted that IT security has become increasingly complex due to a concerning combination of the growing cybercrime economy and dramatic shifts in the IT landscape. The perfect storm produced by three key trends: the prevalence of personal cloud services, the consumerization of IT and the commoditization of cyberattack tools, have made it more challenging than ever before to detect and respond efficiently to attacks.
Breach explosion
To prove his point, Thomas cited a few sobering statistic from the 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report: half of breaches remain undiscovered for months or longer. That’s where Rapid7 has a major advantage in addressing the most common threats.
“Since security incidents are almost inevitable, organizations need to contain exposure quickly when it happens,” Thomas said.
Rapid7 is known for physically marking its milestones on the a timeline that extends across the office floor. Thomas admitted that there’s still some room left to add a few more events in the elevator reception area.
“Given our vision for building a lasting company, I have no doubt we are going to need to extend the timeline on more walls of our office.”
Kyle Alspach contributed to this report.
