Earlier this year, Seattle-based cybersecurity firm ExtraHop made headlines when the company was acquired by Bain Capital Private Equity and Crosspoint Capital Partners for $900 million.
Despite the deal, which closed in July, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jesse Rothstein told the Business Journal ExtraHop is still considering an IPO. He added that the acquisition by private equity firms was the right move for the late-stage growth company.
"Private equity has a certain stigma, I think, from a decade or two ago that really just no longer applies today," Rothstein said. "The private equity companies that we see making technology investments are really growth equity companies."
ExtraHop offers network detection and response (NDR), which allows clients to police their networks for bad actors. Its customers include the Home Depot and Ulta Beauty. Rothstein and fellow co-founder Raja Mukerji, ExtraHop's chief customer officer, were both architects at F5 Networks before founding ExtraHop. In 2016, Rothstein relinquished his CEO role to Arif Kareem and stepped into his current CTO role.
The Business Journal sat down with Rothstein to talk about the company's future, the cybersecurity landscape and the power of bedtime stories. Listen to the full interview below.
