Thycotic & Centrify, Geography, YubiKey, & K7 Antivirus – ESW #218

This is a big one! Thycotic and Centrify are both large mainstays in the identity security space and the merger seems to make a lot of sense. We'll see if TPG plans to sell off the combo in a few years or take them public. TPG is probably best known for rebooting post-Intel McAfee in 2017 and taking them public last year (though their stock price is a tenth of Crowdstrike's and their market cap a fifth the size).

Crowdstrike's stock has quadrupled in the last year. They raised $612m in their 2019 IPO, at a valuation of $6.8bn. The SentinelOne valuation is reportedly more than $10bn. Is SentinelOne worth 50% more than Crowdstrike? I feel like the opposite is true, that the correct valuation is a fraction of Crowdstrike, who has expanded its product offering more than SentinelOne and has always seemed to have more market traction. If and when the S-1 is filed, we'll have a lot more to discuss!

Some serial SPAC folks have engineered a plan for a Qomplx IPO that involves Qomplex acquiring two other companies in the process: Sentar (a risk analytics company) and Tyche (an insurance modeling platform). The deal value is around $1.4bn.

Axonius's $100m Series D more than doubles their funding to date and puts them solidly into unicorn territory with a $1.2bn valuation! Turns out there's some serious value in tackling what we lovingly refer to as "the basics" in this industry. I really, really hope this is an indication that organizations are taking recommendations to focus on fundamentals to heart.

Lower than most Series B rounds we've seen, a $16m round is still nothing to sneeze at. I hadn't heard of Canadian-based Hyas before now, but I was immediately more interested in the origin and meaning of the company's name than in what they actually do. The Greek pantheon is always a solid choice for company names, but Hyas was new to me. Apparently, Hyas was the son of Atlas and died so horribly that his sisters died of grief. Hyas then became associated with bringing rain (his sisters' tears). From what I can tell, Hyas has an XDR/threat hunting-focused platform. I have no idea how tears and rain fit into what they do. Perhaps I've overthought this and Hyas is just an acronym that means "How You Approach Security"? Maybe we'll have them on ESW some day and they can tell the story behind their name! UPDATE: Hyas is a First Nation word meaning "great and powerful"! A very cool name indeed.

Raised $30m - pretty big for a Series B! But then, $15-20m Series As and $30m+ Series Bs are becoming the norm for cybersecurity VC funding rounds. Email security is a Big Deal, with BEC still being a problem and a sizable chunk of breaches kicking off with an email-related attack. Armorblox was one of the first to go after BEC attacks, which appeared to be a solid investment.

"The new ADAssessor Active Directory protection benefits include: Visibility to AD security hygiene issues and actionable alerting for key exposures at the domain, computer, and user levels, Real-time detection of AD privilege escalation, domain compromise and granular restrictions for access to AD information without impacting business operations, Continuous visibility into identities and privileged account risks related to credentials, service accounts, delegated accounts, stale accounts and shared credentials, Unprecedented levels of visibility for security teams since they can run the solution from a single endpoint without needing privileged access to Active Directory"

"TPG Capital, the private equity platform of alternative asset firm TPG, announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement to combine Thycotic, a next-generation, cloud-first company with innovative identity security solutions, and Centrify, a trusted PAM market leader."

"Tequity, an M&A advisory firm with an exclusive focus on global enterprise B2B Cloud, SaaS, and IT companies, acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Toronto-based Strongpoint in their acquisition by Netwrix, a cyber security software company headquartered in Irvine. Strongpoint has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Netwrix. The combined entity is majority-owned by growth private equity firm TA Associates."

"cPacket’s cCloud intelligent observability platform provides a range of services including virtual tapping, packet replication, filtering, slicing, deduplication, load-balancing, packet capture, forensics, replay, RTP analysis, TCP application analysis, and financial services data analysis. The platform eliminates or reduces the number of monitoring sessions - optimizing the data rate and storage consumption"

"The company’s Managed Kubernetes deployments have become a critical part of many large-scale and complex 5G infrastructure roll outs, hybrid cloud containers-as-a-service, and Edge use cases in the retail, media, and entertainment market segments."

"The alerting framework in Kibana integrates with popular third-party platforms, including PagerDuty, Jira, ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams, enabling customers to spot, react to and resolve issues in real time."

"We are excited to report that YubiKey passwordless authentication is now generally available to Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) users, a critical step toward achieving better security without compromising usability. Nearly three years ago, Yubico started on this journey with Microsoft and brought the first FIDO2-enabled security key to the market. Today’s announcement highlights our commitment to continue delivering trust at scale."

"With over 100,000 daily tests, our ImmuniWeb Community Edition enables anyone to ensure a foundational level of application security, privacy and compliance for free. It also allows checking for ongoing phishing campaigns, domain squatting or Dark Web exposure with the following four online security tests"