Funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; two years of explosive growth at Exabeam highlights significant demand for alternative to failing legacy SIEM solutions

 

Exabeam, the next-gen security information and event management company, today announced that it has closed $50 million in Series D funding.

The round, backed entirely by existing investors, was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and supported by Aspect Ventures, Cisco Investments, Icon Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and cybersecurity investor Shlomo Kramer.

The funds will be used to grow the company’s cloud portfolio, as well as sales and channels to expedite global expansion.

The complexities in securing modern digital businesses, along with the increase in sophistication of malicious threats and cybercrime, are fuelling growth in the security information and event management (SIEM) market, which is expected to hit $4.54 billion in 2019.* Historically dominated by a handful of providers, in recent years, the market has shifted to platforms that can support the massive data volumes generated by cloud applications and mobile device use.

Exabeam is carving out a growing piece of the market, with 250 percent market growth in 2017, coming off 300 percent growth in 2016. The company is on track to more than double its market size in 2018. Fuelling this success is the growing industry recognition for Exabeam’s Security Intelligence Platform (SIP); it was named the 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for its SIEM software, and recently won an SC Awards Europe 2018 for Best SIEM.

Customers are choosing Exabeam for its superior threat identification and response capabilities compared to legacy SIEMs. Equally appealing is its flat, predictable pricing model, which allows organisations to store all of their logs, unlike the archaic “by-the-byte” pricing model that forces budget-conscious customers to limit the amount of data covered by the SIEM—creating blind spots that sacrifice the security of the entire organisation.

Exabeam’s SIP delivers where legacy vendors have failed. Built on open source, big data technology, including Elasticsearch and Hadoop, it provides unlimited secure data collection, indexing and search but without volume-based pricing. Advanced machine learning capabilities provide rapid insights into all events, including attacks and vulnerabilities so subtle and precise that humans simply cannot see them. The comprehensive platform contains many other customisable features spanning incident response and threat hunting, giving companies the freedom to scale and select only the security management solutions that fit their business needs.

“Exabeam is deliberately and systematically disrupting the enterprise SIEM space. We’re thrilled to partner with Nir and the team as the company continues to scale,” said Ravi Mhatre, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “After just five years in business, Exabeam is rapidly gaining market share and winning deals 70 percent of the time when pitted head-to-head with the incumbent. That simply cannot be ignored.”

“As a longtime investor in the cybersecurity space, I’ve always been excited about Exabeam’s approach and potential to deliver the next generation of security tech,” said Theresia Gouw, co-founder of Aspect Ventures, and a leading investor in cybersecurity. “It’s clear from the large increase in replacement wins with customers like ADP, Hulu, Safeway, Union Bank that Exabeam is consistently delivering industry-leading technology to the most demanding enterprises and government organisations in the world.”

“Our investors have an amazing track record of investing in companies that truly are disruptive and typically become category leaders,” said Exabeam CEO Nir Polak. “Their experience with high-growth companies like MuleSoft, Nutanix, Zscaler, ForeScout – is invaluable to us in the advice and guidance they pass along to our executive team. The new funding will allow us to invest heavily in our new cloud solutions and reach even more enterprises around the world. We are on track to overtake Splunk and be the next SIEM market leader.”