ThreatLocker CEO: $115M In New Funding Will Help Drive R&D, Support, Marketing With Plans To Double Workforce

‘Our priority is to continue improve our zero trust endpoint platform with continued R&D, making it more and more accessible to more and more MSPs and more businesses that never even dreamed about having proper security in place,’ says ThreatLocker co-founder and CEO Danny Jenkins.

MSP security powerhouse ThreatLocker, which has doubled its revenue over the last year, plans to use $115 million in new Series D funding to drive new product development, support and marketing with plans to double its workforce over the next three years, said co-founder and CEO Danny Jenkins.

"Our priority is to continue to improve our zero trust endpoint platform with continued R&D, making it more and more accessible to more and more MSPs and more businesses that never even dreamed about having proper security in place,” said Jenkins. “We are going to continue educating the market on the importance of this technology and continue our world-class support. We’re expecting to more than double our workforce, adding 500 to 700 employees over the next three years [up from the current 400].”

ThreatLocker is looking for a new facility in Orlando, Fla., to accommodate its growth, said Jenkins.

“We are one of the fastest-growing—if not the fastest-growing— security companies,” he said. “That growth is being driven by high-quality products that solve real problems and deliver tangible results as opposed to ‘wish-ware’ or ‘hope-ware.’ That is the biggest reason for our success with the MSP community.”

Jenkins’s comments came after ThreatLocker announced that it had raised $115 million in Series D funding led by its primary investor, General Atlantic, and secondary investments by StepStone Group and D.E. Shaw Group.

The new funding does not change investor dynamics as the company moves to continue its strong founder status and operate independently as it prepares for an initial public offering over the next several years, said Jenkins.

Among the areas of investment is a doubling of the support team over the next year, continuing what Jenkins called the “best support in the industry” with an average response time of 23 seconds. “We are going to make sure we maintain that best support in the industry level with outcome-based support,” he said.

ThreatLocker also continues to add to its threat intelligence team and is building out a Special Ops Security team made up of the best and brightest security technologists to drive breakthroughs in product development, said Jenkins.

“These are some of the smartest cybersecurity and IT people we can find that sit between the customer and the product development team so they can better understand industry problems, which will result in new product capabilities and features,” he said. “We want to make sure we are solving problems with an IT security customer focus.”

Another innovative service ThreatLocker is moving forward with is an incident response offering aimed at helping businesses that have been hit by ransomware that are not ThreatLocker customers, said Jenkins. “We are going to offer complimentary support services, helping those businesses get secure and locked down after an attack,” he said.

ThreatLocker also continue to funnel a huge amount of cash into marketing with the aim of helping MSPs and customers understand the importance of zero trust, said Jenkins.

“The MSP community is continuously improving the focus on delivering security to customers,” he said. “It benefits the entire industry when MSPs do well. It hurts the industry when MSPs fail to serve their customers by not providing sound security. What we are seeing is an increase in MSPs that care about the security of their clients, which is positive news for the industry.”

David Stinner, president of US itek, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based MSP and MSSP, said he sees the new funding as another sign that ThreatLocker is building out an unmatched one-stop, end-to-end security platform for MSPs.

“I see TheatLocker providing security enhancements that are not available anywhere else,” he said. “ThreatLocker is building out all the necessary security elements an MSP needs as a one-stop shop with SOC [Security Operations Center], incident response, XDR [extended detection and response) and EDR [endpoint detection and response].”

Stinner said he has added a number of new ThreatLocker modules for his customers over the past year, including Network Access Control.

In fact, Stinner said, ThreatLocker is helping drive new virtual CISO engagements for his company.

“That’s leading our sales funnel right now,” he said. “What that really shows is the traditional MSP model is changing because traditional MSP services like help desk are commoditized at this point. Businesses are leaning on organizations like us to act as a virtual CISO. ThreatLocker fits right in with that kind of engagement where we are not doing traditional managed services but instead are focusing on security services, consulting and compliance with ThreatLocker as one of the main pillars of our security offering.”