Cybersecurity firm Tanium Inc. is now valued at a mammoth $5 billion following its latest cash infusion from the investment firm TPG, which has just pumped another $175 million into the company, Reuters reported today.

Somewhat unusually for a round of this size, the money won’t be going directly into the company’s coffers, but will instead be used to buy stock from the firm’s earliest bunch of employees, Reuters said. Neither TPG nor Tanium would comment on the report, but Reuters cited “sources familiar with the investment” as saying it’s a done deal.

In an increasingly crowded and competitive cybersecurity market, Tanium has done rather well for itself, landing big-name customers that include 12 of the top 15 banks in the U.S., six of its top 10 retailers and the U.S. military. The company provides what it calls endpoint protection services, which are used to secure all manner of computer devices.

Reuters said the latest round makes Tanium the best funded startup in cybersecurity, and that’s saying something in the hot market. The company was previously valued at $3.75 billion following a $100 million investment led by TPG a year ago.

The round also shows that cybersecurity remains one of top investment opportunities in tech right now, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. However, he said it remains to be seen which cybersecurity investments will pay off because the market is undergoing a massive technology change with cheap computing and big data capabilities, as well as machine learning.

“Vendors that make it successfully through this transformation have the potential to become long-term cybersecurity leaders,” Mueller said.

Tanium is perhaps looking better positioned than most to navigate the transformation, though. Orion Hindawi (pictured), the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, talked about the company’s growth during a Fortune event last March, claiming that the company had generated “well over $200 million in revenue” in the last year.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing, however. Last year, the company admitted to misusing some customer data for sales demonstrations, while several employees also left the firm in the past year, citing management issues as the reason.

Still, those problems haven’t prevented Tanium from forging ahead, though he hasn’t said whether an initial public offering is imminent. Indeed, rounds in which employees’ stock is sold often is seen as a way to give them liquidity without having to go public.

Tanium appeared to be ready for an IPO before last year’s management issues. At the company’s annual conference in October, Hindawi was coy about IPO timing while conceding it was likely at some point. “We can serve customers just as well either way,” he said, but for now, he added, “I’d rather just buy a bell and ring it at home.”

Relatively few cybersecurity firms have gone public in recent years, but that could be starting to change. Zscaler Inc., also backed by TPG, went public in March and is currently trading above IPO price. Another cybersecurity firm, Carbon Black Inc., also went public earlier this month and saw its stock price rise 26 percent the first trading day. In May, Rohit Kulkarni, managing director and head of research of SharesPost Financial Corp., told SiliconANGLE that investor appetite and interest in cybersecurity is at record levels thanks to ever-increasing security breaches.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE