Arlington, Va.-based cybersecurity firm Distil Networks has raised a $21 million Series B led by a new investor, Bessemer Venture Partners. The funding round represents yet another milestone for Distil Networks, which has experienced "a meteoric rise" in growth since being founded in 2011, Distil Networks CEO and co-founder Rami Essaid told DC Inno. Distil has raised $38 million to date from investors including local firm Militello Capital.
In an interview with DC Inno, Essaid said that the company—which employs about 60—plans to add 100 new employees within 12 months. The hires will come in sales, marketing and engineering, and will be made across three offices. The hiring spree will be used to accelerate the release of Distil’s second product, which is set for early October. Essaid declined to offer specifics on the product but said that Distil would be “expanding its Web application security foothold.”
"With the advent of cheap or free cloud computing resources, anyone with basic computer skills can download open source software and launch a bot attack ... Most companies still have no visibility or control over malicious website traffic. Bots are the culprits behind Web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, account hijacking, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, man-in-the-middle attacks and fraud," Distil's CEO told DC Inno.
Distil, he said, "is just a really easy way to block 99.9 percent of bad bots."
In addition to expanding the company’s team, the capital will be used to open a new office and expand the size of two others in San Fransisco and Arlington. In 2014, Distil opened offices in Raleigh, North Carolina and San Francisco, California. The newest office — bringing the company’s total to four — will be positioned in northern Virginia, Essaid told DC Inno.
Distil Networks is adding new customers every quarter and these clients are also “getting bigger," Essaid said.
Distil’s current clients already include Glassdoor, CrunchBase, FindTheBest.com and Wayfair — which use its security software and services to detect and thwart malicious bot-based hacker attacks. Due to the confidential nature of security contracts, Essaid was unable to discuss the company’s newest cohort of high profile clients.
Existing investors Foundry Group, Techstars, ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund and Correlation Ventures also participated in the $21 million Series B. The venture capital finance round also means that David Cowan, a partner at BVP and the co-founder of VeriSign, will be joining Distil's board of directors.
"By blocking bot traffic, Distil cuts off entire classes of automated fraud and cyber attacks ... [their] service now has the largest database of known bots, and gets smarter every minute," Cowan said.
"Fighting online fraud and other nefarious actors is an arms race," Essaid added. "We wanted to fundamentally change the way businesses protect their web infrastructure. The premise was that if you have to write a rule in a security appliance then it's already too late."
