Another local company just proved that despite the public health crisis, fundraising can be possible.
Herndon cybersecurity startup Expel Inc. has landed $50 million in fresh funding, in a Series D round led by Alphabet Inc. growth fund CapitalG, the company announced this month.
As part of the investment, CapitalG General Partner Gene Frantz will join Expel’s board. Existing investors Battery Ventures, Greycroft, Index Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Scale Venture Partners also participated in the raise.
The 4-year-old Expel, which provides a security operations center as a service for other companies, has raised $117.5 million in financing to date. That included $40 million it raked in last June and a $20 million round in April 2018.
The new capital will enable the Northern Virginia firm to expand its sales and marketing operations, pursue potential growth opportunities beyond the U.S. and bolster its cloud security offerings, it said.
“…while we’re celebrating this news because it’s good for the businesses we help protect every day and the employees who’ve joined us on this journey, celebrating while there’s an incredible amount of uncertainty in the world feels a bit uncomfortable. It’s not lost on us how fortunate we are,” wrote Expel’s co-founders — CEO Dave Merkel, Chief Operating Officer Yanek Korff and Justin Bajko, vice president of strategy and business development — in a blog post.
“Our hope is that with this new round of funding, we can continue to serve our customers (and add new ones to the Expel family) to the best of our abilities, making space for them to do more than chase alerts… at a time when they need that flexibility the most,” the blog reads.
The raise follows the launch in January of a $1.4 million headquarters expansion that would add 164 new jobs — in engineering, customer experience, IT, sales and marketing — over the next three years. Expel plans to more than double the footprint of its Fairfax County HQ at 12950 Worldgate Drive, adding another 30,000 square feet to its 24,000-square-foot site. The company had received funding and consulting support from Virginia Jobs Investment Program to broaden its roots in Herndon, the Washington Business Journal reported at the time.
As to how Covid-19 has affected the industry? Expel Chief Information Security Officer Bruce Potter told the WBJ last month that cloud-based organizations have been pretty resilient amid the widespread shift to telework, because they have tools like automated cybersecurity to track potential malware, and the ability to limit which devices can access data, for instance.
“One of the things that was striking to me is that companies that went down the cloud native road, who been pushing aggressively toward cloud solutions, took this work from home very much in stride,” he said. “From a technology foundation, I’ve talked to companies that have had to do basically nothing.”
