Just two years in and a Morrisville startup is already claiming unicorn status, thanks to a $70 million raise, a $1 billion valuation and – according to its CEO, “heads-down” hustle.
JupiterOne, a fast-growing cybersecurity firm led by Erkang Zheng, claims it's earned the moniker held by companies valued at $1 billion or more – firms such as Raleigh-based Pendo, Cary-based Epic Games and Durham’s Phononic. It crossed the threshold with a Series C round disclosed Thursday.
Tribe Capital led the round, with participation from new investors Intel Capital and Alpha Square Group. Existing investors Sapphire, Bain Capital, Cisco Investments and Splunk Ventures also contributed to the raise.
Zheng, who along with JupiterOne’s employees maintains a “very significant stake” in the firm, calls the investor support “validating.” And it gives the company three to four years of runway, possibly to profitability, he said. “It just depends on how we execute and how we accelerate,” he said.
At valuations this high, the exit rumors start to swirl. But Zheng says it’s too early for IPO buzz.
“After you cross this milestone, it is sort of natural and logical to think IPO sometime down the road,” he said. “Sure, that absolutely is a possibility, but I still think it is too soon. We are focused, heads-down building the product.”
JupiterOne is “doing something that nobody else is,” he said. It’s trying to create new cybersecurity standards with its cyber-asset attack surface management platform. It crunches data to provide visibility into a company’s “entire cyber-asset universe.” And that’s where the focus is, Zheng said.
“Everything else will just happen naturally,” he said.
In the meantime, the firm is “hiring like crazy” and is currently at 150 people.
“It’s hard to imagine that two years ago … we were a tiny company with only 17 people,” Zheng said.
The company is also looking to expand its headquarters. The plan is to stay in the Research Triangle Park area, but seek out a larger space, he said. .
JupiterOne relocated its headquarters from Perimeter Park Drive to the Aerial Center Business Park off of Airport Boulevard in Morrisville just last year. At the time, the firm had just over 50 employees.
Prior to the $70 million Series C, it last raised capital a year ago, a $30 million Series B round that included investments from Bain Capital and Sapphire Ventures. At the time, Zheng said he hadn’t anticipated raising money so soon, as the firm had closed a $19 million round in September of 2020. It was the investors that had approached the cybersecurity firm first.
And it’s a similar story this time. Zheng said it was also the investors who approached JupiterOne about the $70 million opportunity.
“It wasn’t really so much about the money,” Zheng said this week. “We can get the money and the fundraising anywhere. It really is about having the right partner who can help us scale.”
JupiterOne got its start within the walls of LifeOmic four years ago. The idea came from challenges Zheng, then the chief information security officer at LifeOmic, had experienced at multiple posts, including those at Fideity and (IBM NYSE: IBM).
Today, the company, which counts Reddit, Databricks and OhMD as customers, aims to automate cybersecurity asset management. The goal is to make risk analysis and compliance reporting easier and cheaper.
