Privately held security vendor AlienVault announced on Aug. 19 that it has raised $52 million in a new Series E round of funding, led by Institutional Venture Partners and including the participation of GGV Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Trident Capital, and Caufield and Byers. Total funding to-date for AlienVault now stands at $116 million.
AlienVault CEO Barmak Meftah said that the new funding will be used to help his company expand its market reach as well as grow its technology capabilities. AlienVault's current technology includes the Open Source Security Information and Event Management (OSSIM) project, the commercial Unified Security Management Platform (USM) as well as the AlienVault Open Threat Exchange (OTX).
"Our company is very capital-efficient and we leverage in-bound demand generation that is not a very expensive model," Meftah told eWEEK. "So our customer acquisition cost is economically appealing."
Meftah added that he's currently on track for year-over-year revenue growth of 65 percent and is adding up to 400 new customers every quarter. The total addressable market for the technologies that his company sells is large and there is room for continued growth acceleration, he said.
"The vast majority of the market falls into the sweet spot we're going after, in that they have a large attack surface and all the issues of a large financial services vendor, but just don't have the expertise," Meftah said.
Meftah explained that the USM platform offers the promise of enabling an organization to get value from the system within 30 minutes. AlienVault announced its second-generation OpenTheat Exchange (OTX) this year; the exchange now has 24,000 subscribers as part of the threat intelligence network. The USM platform was expanded earlier this year with an announcement at the RSA security conference for Amazon cloud deployment. Meftah said that he has a few additional products in the pipeline that he can't talk about yet, but that he's very excited about.
"The theme of the new products is about simplifying threat visibility and analytics even more," Meftah said.
Meftah added that he might even be open to acquiring other technologies and companies in areas that are adjacent to AlienVault.
"We have always been a big believer that midmarket customers love simplicity, so there are some security controls that we can potentially go and acquire," Meftah said.
While AlienVault is looking to grow revenues from commercial product sales, it isn't going to abandon the open-source base from its OSSIM project either. Meftah emphasized that the company will continue to support OSSIM, and he sees a healthy volume of customer conversions from using the open-source product to the commercial USM platform.
"We will continue to keep and increase our support for the OSSIM community," Meftah said. "We'll continue the innovation in OSSIM, and that community is extremely important to us."
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
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