Intel among investors in Cisco vets’ mysterious security startup
A stealthy startup called Skyport Systems Inc. received its first share of the limelight this morning after landing $30 million in funding from a group of investors by Index Ventures and including Intel Capital to drive a “fundamentally new approach to security”. That’s about as much as the team is willing to reveal.
But the little that can be pieced together about Skyport, which is led by former executives from switching kingpin Cisco Systems Inc. and several other top networking vendors, does provide a partial picture of what its people have been working on for the last two years.
A job posting for a back-end engineer on the startup’s LinkedIn page reveals that it’s building a cloud-based service incorporating Samza and Storm, two of the most popular open-source frameworks for processing streaming data. Given its leadership’s background and security focus, Skyport likely plans on using that combination to analyze organizations’ network activity for threats.
That puts the startup roughly in the same league as ProtectWise Inc., another provider of cloud-based traffic and threat monitoring that also raised a considerable amount of early-stage funding for its service recently. But there are several stark differences between the two, in particular the fact that a second job posting appears to indicate that Skyport’s platform will also include a backup and recovery function.
Beyond that, its website belies a focus on infrastructure that ProtectWise has not mirrored in its messaging. Coupled with the fact that Skyport boasts of employing “ some of the world’s leading experts in virtualization,” that could mean its service has an on-premise component as well – likely some kind of management integration – aimed at helping administrators quickly act on the real-time insights from its service.
Connecting the dots, it’s not hard to see why Skyport’s combination of bleeding-edge analytics, disaster recovery and experienced management has caught the attention of Intel Capital, which is not even the biggest name to have thrown its weight behind the team. The new $30 million round also includes contributions from Hortonworks backer Index ventures, which led the investment, and existing backer Sutter Hill Ventures.
