Arlington, Va.-based ThreatConnect, the developers of a cloud and on-premise software suite to aggregate, collect and analyze threat intelligence data to make smart moves, have raised an impressive $16 million Series B funding round. The round was led by SAP National Security Services (SAP NS2), the defense-focused subsidiary of publicly traded cloud, IT, data analytics and enterprise applications firm SAP (NYSE: SAP). The influx of cash will be used, CEO Adam Vincent said, to expand business globally, for product development efforts and hiring purposes.
"ThreatConnect will use this significant investment to increase its market penetration globally," the company described in its announcement.
Vincent told DC Inno, "In the last year, we have more than doubled in size. This round further enables us to continue hiring in sales, marketing and engineering to keep pace with the demand we have experienced in the market."
He added, "every investment ThreatConnect has taken so far has been strategic at some level. The company has not at any point needed to take funding but rather has done so in a calculated fashion to better serve the market and grow. That said, partnering with SAP NS2 is clearly a strategic choice to serve an even larger audience and grow market share even faster."
It’s difficult to imagine a better solution and partner to showcase the speed, scalability and power of HANA
Return backers Vienna, Va.-based Grotech Ventures also participated in the Series B investment along with "other strategic investors," the company announced. The secondary investment in ThreatConnect by Grotech Ventures, following their $4 million Series A in November 2014, represents what has become a prominent portfolio focus on high potential, cloud-centric cybersecurity companies by the local venture capital firm. Other recognizable cybersecurity brands in their portfolio include Invincea and Secure Computing.
"Security operations [have] become a mission critical element of the enterprise in national security and commercial organizations alike. ThreatConnect is the leader in the marketplace and provides a true threat intelligence platform to address the unmet needs of those organizations. It’s difficult to imagine a better solution and partner to showcase the speed, scalability and power of HANA,” said Ron Police, COO of SAP NS2, in a statement.
Importantly, the new deal with SAP NS2 will also lead to ThreatConnect's first ever joint product. The aforementioned SAP NS2 product named HANA by Police, will be used in combination with ThreatConnect's recently launched TC Exchange and software development kit to build a new offering.
The TC Exchange and dev kit gives users, in broad strokes, an open source workbench to "share applications ... choose and modify applications, and accelerate solution development through plug and play activities."
Rather than being a firewall developer or device-specific security software company, what ThreatConnect sells is a Threat Intelligence Platform or TIP.
A TIP is, in essence, a convenient dashboard that works to display the relevant risks that a company is facing in realtime from hackers, malware and/or harmful bot-based attacks. Think of it as a user interface for cybersecurity operations, which is particularly useful for both senior executives and security analysts to make educated decisions.
A significant aspect of ThreatConnect's business is tied to security partnerships that are formed with active response and damage mitigation companies. These partnerships include participation from industry leaders like Tenable Network Security, Bit 9, SourceFire, Splunk and Fidelis Cybersecurity, among others, who can integrate ThreatConnect's product into their own offerings and equally provide support from the native platform. The result, is a multilateral increase in customer channels for multiple parties.
"Users are able to take advantage of multi-sourced data within the ThreatConnect platform to then push threat indicators and context back out to partner-integrated products. With the ThreatConnect partner program, organizations take the next step and not only analyze complex data, but defend and act on that knowledge," ThreatConnect writes on its website.
