Axonius closed a Series D funding round and achieved unicorn status as the cybersecurity asset management startup looks to scale growth globally and expand its platform.
The New York-based company said the $100 million round was led by private equity firm Stripes and comes on the heels of doubling headcount during the pandemic as well as triple-digit annual recurring revenue growth in 2020. With the funding, Axonius said it becomes the latest cybersecurity vendor to achieve a valuation of more than $1 billion.
“What Axonius has accomplished in such a short time is remarkable,“ Stripes Founder and Partner Ken Fox said in a statement. ”With its commitment to solving a fundamental challenge with a simple, powerful platform that collects and correlates data from hundreds of products its customers already use, Axonius has built one of the most beloved products in security.”
[Related: Exclusive: Axonius Partner Community Driving 50 Percent Of New Business]
Axonius was founded in 2017, employs 148 people, and has now raised $195 million in five rounds of outside funding, according to LinkedIn. The company in March 2020 closed a $58 million Series C round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, who also participated in the most recent round.
The company grew from $1 million of annual recurring revenue to $10 million of annual recurring revenue in less than 15 months, according to Amit Karp, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. Axonius said it counts The New York Times, Schneider Electric, AB InBev, John Hancock, Landmark Health and AppsFlyer among its existing customers.
“I am incredibly proud of what the Axonius team has been able to accomplish,” CEO Dean Sysman (pictured) said in a statement. “I often say that time is the enemy of cybersecurity, and the rate and pace of change mean that IT and security teams can no longer afford to spend time manually compiling data about devices, users, and cloud instances for things like incident response, audits, and compliance.”
Axonius gives customers a comprehensive asset inventory to discover security gaps, automatically validating and enforcing security policies. The platform can be deployed in minutes and integrates with more than 300 other security and management offerings, according to Axonius.
The company enjoyed 215 percent growth last year, with channel partners contributing well over 50 percent of it, Mark Daggett, Axonius’ vice president of worldwide channels and alliances, told CRNtv last week. Daggett said Axonius plans to hire additional channel-dedicated personnel in the coming months.
Axonius’ partner community has seen the most growth in the United States, but the channel is quickly gaining momentum in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Daggett wrote in his 2021 CRN Channel Chiefs profile. From a vertical standpoint, Daggett said Axonius is gaining traction in technology, health care and financial services, and is also getting brought into significant deals in the U.S. government space.
Market development will be an area of focus for Axonius in 2021, and Daggett said the company has already begun securing budgetary support. Axonius will put together a menu of market development options that align with partners business planning and deliver an adequate return on investment, according to Daggett.
Daggett joined Axonius in February 2020 from Cylance, where he served as director of global distribution following the $1.4 billion acquisition of the endpoint security vendor by Blackberry. At the time of his hiring, Daggett told CRN he was looking to hire regional partner managers, build incentives beyond deal registration, and invest in enablement and training resources for sales and technical teams.
“We have found Axonius invaluable in helping us tie together and tap into our existing sources of asset inventory data within our environment and helping us to paint a more clear and complete picture of our environment,” Nick McNulty, director of vulnerability management, ETS Shared Security Services at John Hancock, said in a statement.
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