Illumio gets $125 million in Series D round, targets federal market
Cybersecurity startup Illumio announced Wednesday a $125 million Series D round investment led by J.P. Morgan Chase, bringing total investment in the Silicon Valley firm to $267 million since 2014. The new round marks the entrance of Wall Street investors after years of investment from some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists.
The data center and cloud security company has begun to hire a team dedicated to federal sales including Eric Teasdale, the company’s federal sales director, who joined in April. Teasdale, who is “actively negotiating” on several projects, arrived from federal sales positions at Salesforce and Apptio.
The Trump administration’s federal IT budget asks for $95.7 billion in 2018, a billion-dollar increase, although most federal agencies would see their budgets stay flat or decrease. Illumio intends in particular to target defense and intelligence agencies first, because they are typically early adopters when it comes to major government tech endeavors, Cohen said.
The dedicated federal team is still small within the company, and the onramp — including obtaining all the necessary certifications — is considerable. But the government’s push toward the cloud represents a pretty obvious opportunity for the company to enter “the largest market in the world,” Illumio chief commercial officer Alan Cohen said.
Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, 8VC and Accel joined J.P. Morgan Chase in the investment round.
The new injection of money will go to building presence in new markets, Cohen told CyberScoop, including in the U.S. federal government, the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia.
Illumio’s products are meant to secure networks once hackers are already inside through “adaptive segmentation,” which controls communications between applications and network nodes. The analogy of choice over at Illumio is a submarine’s water-tight compartments that can be individually breached but still not sink the entire vessel.
In addition to the public sector, Illumio’s customer list includes most major financial institutions and software-as-a-service companies in the U.S., Cohen said, like Morgan Stanley and Salesforce.
Competition in the cloud security market, which Cohen estimates at $2 to $4 billion, includes Cisco and VMware.
