UPDATED 09:00 EDT / MARCH 31 2020

SECURITY

Axonius lands $58M to shed light on hidden IT assets and vulnerabilities

Cybersecurity startup Axonius Inc. today announced that it has raised a $58 million funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, a follow-up to a year in which it claims to have seen revenues soar more than 910%.

New York-based Axonius provides a software platform that helps information technology departments find insecure systems in the corporate network. The platform connects to the existing security tools a company uses and analyzes the data collected by those tools to create an inventory of all the organization’s IT assets. From there, administrators can search the list to find systems that may be vulnerable to attack.

If a company has a policy of deploying a certain antivirus product on all Amazon Web Services instances, the IT department could configure Axonius to surface instances that don’t have antivirus installed. The platform can also track down systems with other types of weak points such as known software vulnerabilities or misconfigured security settings.

Axonius faces competition from several other security visibility providers, including ForeScout Technologies Inc., which is publicly traded. But the startup says that it has nonetheless managed to boost revenue by more than 910% last year, though it didn’t provide absolute numbers. That would suggest an accelerated growth rate in the latter part of 2019: Axonius in August reported a 400% year-over-year revenue increase for the first eight months of that year.

One way the startup has sought to differentiate itself from rivals is by providing automation features as part of its platform. In addition to finding insecure assets like cloud instances without an antivirus installed, Axonius’ platform can also automatically take remediative steps such as installing a missing piece of software or applying security patches.

The startup plans to use the new $58  million investment to keep expanding the capabilities of the platform as well as to beef up sales and marketing efforts.  In the longer term, Axonius Chief Executive Officer Dean Sysman said, “our goal is to go public as an independent cybersecurity asset management platform.”

“In cybersecurity, you see a huge number of startups that aim to get acquired quickly. But that’s not our focus,” Sysman told SiliconANGLE. “We want to build a brand and a cybersecurity company that is formidable and built to last.”

Axonius has raised a total of $95 million to date. Besides Lightspeed, the startup is also backed by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, OpenView, YL Ventures, Vertex and WTI, all of which participated in this latest round.

Photo: Axonius

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