Exabeam Inc.’s investors have provided it with an additional $200 million to help it win more market share in the cybersecurity market, where the startup competes with a pair of software platforms for detecting and responding to breaches.

The round, which was announced today, values Exabeam at $2.4 billion. The startup announced in conjunction that cybersecurity industry veteran Michael DeCesare is taking the helm as president and chief executive.

The leadership change signals that the round could potentially be one of Exabeam’s last private investments before going public. DeCesare is joining the startup after serving as the CEO of ForeScout Technologies., a provider of software for securing devices such as employee laptops that went public in 2017. The executive was previously the president of McAfee, which trades on the Nasdaq exchange.

Exabeam offers two software platforms in the so-called XDR and SIEM categories of the cybersecurity market, respectively. The XDR, or extended detection and response, category comprises tools that offer features for both spotting breaches and fixing them. SIEM is short for security information and event management, a term used to describe platforms that can analyze threat data from many different sources to identify difficult-to-detect attack attempts.

Exabeam claims its XDR and SIEM products make companies’ cybersecurity teams more productive than competing products. According to the startup, its software can roughly halve the amount of time required to detect and respond to a threat. This allows cybersecurity professionals to respond to more alerts in each given work day, which means a lower risk of a potential breach going unnoticed.

The productivity improvements Exabeam is promising are the result of several different features. One of them is Smart Timelines, which, according to the startup, automatically assembles security logs from a breach into a timeline describing the sequence of events that led up to the incident. Administrators normally have to perform the task by hand.

Another key feature of Exabeam’s software is its built-in content library. Content in a cybersecurity context refers to the detection algorithms, blocking rules and specialized knowledge that a breach prevention product uses to respond to threats. Exabeam’s content library can be used by cybersecurity teams to glean technical details about its products, such as what kind of hacking attempts they are capable of fending off, that’s useful for planning purposes.

The startup’s feature set has helped it win deals with large enterprises such as Levi Strauss & Co. and NTT Data Corp. Exabeam’s customer base is generating more than $100 million in annual revenues, it disclosed today on occasion of the funding.

“We led this round of funding to provide the company with the resources necessary to support its sustainable, long-term growth and value creation,” said Pravin Vazirani, managing director and co-head of tech investing at Blue Owl Capital, which led Exabeam’s $200 million round.

The other participants in the round included Acrew Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. Exabeam has raised a total of nearly $400 million from investors, which makes it one of the most heavily funded players in the cybersecurity startup ecosystem. 

Photo: Exabeam