Skycure, the leader in mobile threat defense, yesterday announced it has completed a $16.5 million series B investment led by Foundation Capital. Skycure will use the funds to expand the company’s presence in EMEA and APAC, broaden its foothold with Global 1000 customers, and invest in further developing the company’s award winning mobile threat defense platform. This round brings Skycure’s total funding to $27.5 million. All of the company’s previous investors participated in this round, including Shasta Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital, Skycure customer New York Life, and private investors Peter McKay, and Michael Weider. Skycure also added Lane Bess, industry veteran and former CEO of Palo Alto Networks, as a private investor in this series. As part of the announcement, Skycure will add Foundation Capital general partner Paul Holland to the company’s board of directors.
“We’re in the midst of a massive security revolution driven by tiny devices,” said Adi Sharabani, CEO and co-founder of Skycure. “Mobile is the biggest challenge to enterprise security today and it requires vastly different considerations than desktop, network, or even cloud security. To me, this investment is one more step in helping our customers meet that challenge. We are looking forward to growing our customer base so that enterprises no longer have to fear the risks of mobile. Paul Holland’s industry-leading experience scaling sales forces from early stages all the way to the public markets will be crucial in getting us to the next level. We’re excited to have him join our board.”
Holland previously invested in MobileIron, making his appointment the third major enterprise mobility management (EMM) vendor represented on Skycure’s board, which already includes Jayaram Bhat, former CEO of Zenprise (now Citrix), and Peter McKay, formerly of VMware AirWatch. All three EMM visionaries have partnered with Skycure to address the mobile threat gap in managing enterprise mobile devices.
“Enterprise mobile security is a burgeoning, multi-billion-dollar market,” said Paul Holland, general partner at Foundation Capital. “Skycure’s multi-layered security solutions are the most innovative and comprehensive in that market. And the company is built on an enviable combination of deep intellectual property, the strongest products on the market, and an incredibly skilled founding team.”
Skycure helps enterprises secure employee mobile devices when adopting BYOD to increase productivity. According to a recent Information Security report, one in five enterprises has experienced a data breach via a BYOD or COPE device. Mobile devices are constantly under attack on multiple fronts, with cyber criminals finding any way to compromise them, from configuration vulnerabilities to rogue networks to content manipulation to malware. Skycure’s most recent mobile threat intelligence report found that nearly every organization with more than 200 devices has at least one device infected with malware. Skycure has also found that over time in a typical organization, about 23% of the mobile devices will be exposed to a network threat in the first month of security monitoring. This number increases to 45% over the following three months.
“The more devices we carry to streamline business, the larger the attack surface to the organizations grows,” said Yair Amit, CTO and co-founder of Skycure. “IT departments just can’t deal with the massive assault on their mobile devices every day from vulnerability exploits, malware, and network threats. Skycure’s predictive technology uses a multi-layered approach that leverages our crowd-sourced threat intelligence, plus device- and server-based analysis, to proactively protect mobile devices from all of these threats. Solutions using a single approach are just not effective. With our new funding we can focus more on research and invest more in development, further enhancing our security innovation and expanding our product leadership in the market.”
Skycure has gained significant traction in the past year, adding multiple Fortune 500 customers to its roster and increasing existing customer investment and use cases. Since Skycure’s series A funding in March 2015, the company has expanded the number of devices and active users under Skycure protection by more than 400 percent. The Skycure Mobile Threat Defense platform has performed more than 150 million network tests and detected tens of thousands of malware installations, including repackaged versions of the latest mobile game sensation, Pokémon Go. The platform scans five times more apps today and monitors 10 times more networks than last year.
Skycure has also expanded its market presence through the growing Skycure channel partner network. Partners are also experiencing rising customer demand for protection against mobile threats.
“With the sprawl of devices we’re seeing in market from an increasingly cloud-based and mobile workforce, we find many of our customers lack proper visibility into how big a risk certain end user behaviors are to the enterprise,” said Sara Onyschuk, Director of Client and Cloud Solutions, Softchoice. “Skycure adds another great offering to our IT solutions and managed services capabilities that not only gives our customers that visibility, it predicts and protects their devices from all types of threats, without compromising an employee’s mobile experience.”
Skycure Mobile Threat Defense PlatformSkycure offers the most complete, accurate and effective mobile threat defense solution, delivering unparalleled depth of threat intelligence to predict, detect and protect against the broadest range of existing and unknown threats. Skycure’s predictive technology uses a layered approach that leverages massive crowd-sourced threat intelligence, in addition to both device- and server-based analysis, to proactively protect mobile devices from malware, network threats, and app/OS vulnerability exploits. Malware detection techniques include static and dynamic analysis, crowd-based anomaly detection, as well as analysis based on signatures, app behavior, structure, permissions and more. Protection against network threats includes a built-in VPN that protects the device while maintaining network connectivity during an attack and a unique corporate resource protection feature that blocks communication with specific valuable resources (mail servers, file shares and other business systems) during a network attack, while allowing non-critical connections. Skycure provides a complete risk assessment of an organization and each device, and integrates with all major EMMs.
The Skycure platform has been honored with multiple awards including winner of the 2016 Cybersecurity Excellence Award for Mobile Security, and the Cyber Defense Magazine INFOSEC Award for Next Gen Mobile Endpoint Security Solution. Skycure was also named to the CIO Review list of the 20 Most Promising BYOD Solution Providers.
