Vectra AI has announced a $130 million round of funding led by Blackstone Growth. According to the company, the investment is expected to drive Vectra’s continued growth through platform innovation and expansion into new markets and geographies. This will further solidify its Cognito platform as a market-leading solution for artificial intelligence (AI)-driven cloud security for threat detection and response, Vectra AI said. Existing investors also participated in the funding round, increasing the company’s total funding to more than $350 million at a post-money $1.2 billion valuation.
As recent high-profile incidents impacting SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange (Hafnium) illustrate, breaches are becoming commonplace and hard to detect because state actors and cybercriminals use multi-stage attacks that exploit supply chain weaknesses, legitimate tools, and impersonate users to steal data. As the threat landscape continues to become more complex, security leaders must commit themselves to enhancing research and development, innovation, and strategic implementation of resource-relieving technology, such as AI. This product innovation is necessary to provide the contextual awareness security teams need to combat the expanding attack surface, created by the increased use of cloud resources and SaaS applications, mobile devices, work-from-home access and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Hitesh Sheth, President and Chief Executive Officer at Vectra, said, “As we look to the future, Blackstone’s global presence, operational resources, and in-house technology expertise will help us achieve our mission to become one of the dominant cybersecurity companies in the world.”
Customer demand for threat detection and response in the private and public clouds, and the immediate value Vectra’s AI-driven Cognito platform delivers to customers, are major forces driving the company’s global growth. Cognito detects attacker behaviours and protects its users from being compromised, regardless of location. The platform works across the complex enterprise IT infrastructure to continuously learn, and deploys advanced AI, threat intelligence feeds and known attack profiles to identify breaches as they are being executed. This approach provides security teams with invaluable time to respond to threats and seamlessly integrates with existing security tools to automatically remediate threats.
John Stecher, Chief Technology Officer at Blackstone, said, “Through our experience as a client of Vectra, we’ve been highly impressed by their world-class technology and exceptional team. They have exactly the types of tools that technology leaders need to separate the signal from the noise in defending their organizations from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. We’re excited to back Vectra and Hitesh as a strategic partner in the years ahead supporting their continued growth.”
In 2020, the company continued to experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeding 100 percent, while sales of Cognito Detect for Microsoft Office 365 have grown at a rate of over 700 percent.
