Bromium Raises $40M to Fuel R&D in Virtualized Security

In a vote of confidence, investors are pumping $40 million in new funding into security startup Bromium. The company, which former Citrix XenSource executives founded, is all about leveraging virtualization technology to enable more secure operating system environments.

Since its founding in 2011, Bromium has raised a total of $75 million. In 2012, when the company was still in stealth mode, co-founder Simon Crosby explained that Bromium’s goal was to build a Byzantine fault tolerant system. The basic idea behind Byzantine fault tolerance is a system that is able to survive multiple and arbitrary forms of attack or failure across any of its component parts.

Bromium officially launched its first commercial product, vSentry, in June 2012. The technology involves the use of micro virtual machines that break up the various pieces of computation on an operating system, Gaurav Banga, CEO of Bromium, told eWEEK.

Each of the micro virtual machines provides a degree of isolation and security against the other and minimizes the risk of vulnerabilities being exposed to the underlying operating system.

vSentry version 2.0 shipped this past summer, and the company now has more than 30 large customers using the product, Banga said.

Bromium aims to use the new financing to fund further research and development to help scale up the business model and double revenue. The $40 million is also a testament to investors’ confidence and belief that Bromium has a viable growth model, Banga said.

“The cyber-security problem is acute, and it’s a good time to harness the momentum that we have,” Banga said. “You don’t raise $40 million unless you have a good valuation.”

Bromium currently has a recurring revenue model, and more products beyond just vSentry are in the works, Banga said. To date, Bromium has focused on the x86 market.

“We want to increase our investment in mobile,” Banga said.

With the new capital now in hand, Banga isn’t thinking much about an exit strategy either—whether that strategy is an initial public offering (IPO) or otherwise, he said.

“I’m just trying to grow the business,” Banga said. “An IPO is just a milestone; we look at our milestones as being the next level of revenue and customers.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.