New funding to accelerate growth and support new Machine Identity Protection Development Fund
Venafi®, the leading provider of machine identity protection, today announced the closing of a $100 million round of financing, led by TCV with additional participation from existing investors, QuestMark Partners and NextEquity Partners. TCV is one of the largest and most respected providers of capital to growth-stage private and public companies in the technology industry and has backed industry-leading companies, including Airbnb, Alarm.com, Cradlepoint, Genesys, Netflix, Rapid7, Silver Peak, Splunk, Spotify and Zillow. As part of the transaction, TCV general partner, Jake Reynolds, joins Venafi’s board of directors.
The funding will be used to accelerate Venafi’s growth and to cement the firm’s growing market leadership. In addition to fueling growth, $12.5 million of the investment will be made available to third-party developers in the first tranche of the new Machine Identity Protection Development Fund. Venafi created the fund to accelerate the integration of machine identity intelligence into a wide range of machines in the enterprise and further enhance and expand the machine identity ecosystem. The fund will allow developers, including consultancies, systems integrators, fast-moving startups, open source developers and cybersecurity vendors to apply for sponsorship. This sponsorship will allow recipients to build integrations that deliver greater visibility, intelligence and automation for Venafi customers across any technology that creates or consumes machine identities.
“Identity is the foundation of security,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi. “The cyber world is made up of machines, and all machines require identities for the cyber world to be secure. As a society, we understand the risks associated with human identity theft very well, and we spend over $8 billion per year protecting human identities. However, most organizations don’t yet understand the risks associated with machine identities and, as a result, spend almost nothing to protect them. This leaves our global digital economy at risk. TCV has a long history of partnering with the world’s leading technology firms, so we’re very excited about the opportunity to work with them. Their investment and expertise will help us ensure that the world’s machines, including hardware and software from smart machines, virtual servers, applications, containers, and more, are connected, safe and secure.”
Just as usernames and passwords are used to identify and authenticate humans, machine identities enable the trusted relationships between machines that control the flow of sensitive data. Because machine identities are poorly understood and often unprotected, they are subject to being exploited by cybercriminals. The Venafi platform protects the machine identities whose underlying technology is cryptographic keys and digital certificates by providing unparalleled visibility, intelligence and automation.
“The team at TCV is excited about our partnership with Venafi,” said Jake Reynolds, general partner at TCV. “DevOps and IoT are driving growth in the number of machines thanks to cloud computing, virtualization, and the proliferation of connected devices. Venafi is well-positioned to provide the machine identity protection for all enterprise machines, and we look forward to supporting the Venafi team as they continue to scale in this rapidly expanding market.”
With over 30 patents, Venafi delivers innovative machine identity protection solutions for the world’s most demanding, security-conscious Global 5000 organizations, including the top five U.S. health insurers; the top five U.S. airlines; four of the top five U.S. retailers; and four of the top five banks in each of the following countries: U.S., U.K., Australia and South Africa.
About Venafi
Venafi is the inventor and cybersecurity market leader in machine identity protection, securing connections and communications between machines. Venafi protects machine identity types by orchestrating cryptographic keys and digital certificates for SSL/TLS, IoT, mobile and SSH. Venafi provides global visibility of machine identities and the risks associated with them for the extended enterprise—on premises, mobile, virtual, cloud and IoT—at machine speed and scale. Venafi puts this intelligence into action with automated remediation that reduces the security and availability risks connected with weak or compromised machine identities while safeguarding the flow of information to trusted machines and preventing communication with untrusted machines.
