Israeli mobile threat defense startup Skycure today 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.
Skycure, which is available for download on iOS and Android, detects and predicts threats by leveraging large amounts of crowd data to protect against any type of global or targeted mobile attack. It is one of the first mobile predictive threat solution of this kind for enterprises. It also can be tested and deployed without requiring access to internal systems.
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Skycure won the award for Best Startup at Geektime’s Conference in 2013.
Skycure also added in this series Lane Bess, industry veteran and former CEO of Palo Alto Networks, as a private investor. As part of the announcement, Skycure will add Foundation Capital general partner Paul Holland to the company’s board of directors.
The $8 million Series A funding round was led by Shasta Ventures, with participation from Skycure customer New York Life Insurance Company, existing investor Pitango Venture Capital, and industry leaders Peter McKay and Michael Weider.
This round brings Skycure’s total funding to $27.5 million.
Skycure was founded in May 2012 by CEO Adi Sharabani and CTO Yair Amit.
Sharabani said, “We’re in the midst of a massive security revolution driven by tiny devices. 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.”
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.
Amit said, “The more devices we carry to streamline business, the larger the attack surface to the organizations grows. 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.”
Three Israeli startups have been funded to predict, identify and alleviate cyber attacks: CyActive, which was sold for between $60-80 million to PayPal. Five days later, enSilo, raised a seed round of $2-3 million.
