Security vendor Illumio today announced that it has raised $125 million in a Series D round of funding to help the company continue building and delivering its Adaptive Security Platform to customers around the world.
The funding round was led by J.P. Morgan Asset Management and included the participation of existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, 8VC, Accel and Data Collective (DCVC). Total funding to date for Illumio now stands at $267 million.
Illumio emerged from stealth in October 2014, with the promise of helping companies to segment their networks, in a bid to reduce the attack surface and minimize risks.
“It has been 10 quarters that we have been shipping software in market now,” Andrew Rubin, CEO and co-founder of Illumio, told eWEEK.
Rubin said that the business has been outperforming expectations since emerging from stealth. He added that the new funding round was an opportunistic capital raise and Illumio was not out actively soliciting and pitching investors for money. J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which led the round of funding, is also an Illumio customer.
“We believe that we have an opportunity to build a large company and be in a market leadership position,” Rubin said.
Adaptive Security Platform
Illumio’s core technology is the company’s Adaptive Security Platform, which enables organizations to segment their networks and users. The platform includes a Policy Compute Engine (PCE), which acts as the main control node for establishing best practices and security policies for a network and its users. The Virtual Enforcement Node (VEN) fits inside of workloads to make sure they comply with policies as defined and managed by PCE.
Another primary element of the Illumio platform is the Illumination feature, which provides visibility into what is running in an environment. Illumination builds a live application dependency map that organizations can use to see how different services flow across a network.
In February 2016, Illumio expanded its platform with an adaptive user segmentation capability that helps lock down application visibility and connectivity to unauthorized users.
“Illumio from day one has had the idea of building a software brain that is capable of understanding the environment, starting with the data center and eventually extending further out,” Rubin said.
Illumio has built integrations with multiple vendors in recent years to help extend its footprint, including working with F5 load balancers as well as Cisco and Arista switches. Illumio is now working on cloud integrations with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure that will enable the platform to communicate with the native security controls inside the cloud providers.
“One of the strongest differentiators for Illumio is that we have the ability to insert our technology into any compute instance running in any data center, private or public cloud,” Rubin said.
Looking forward, Illumio’s technology is likely to grow and expand in several ways.
“If you look at what you have announced, we’re looking at taking the Illumio software brain and using it to provide more visibility and control over more elements,” Rubin said.
Alan Cohen, chief commercial officer at Illumio told eWEEK that Illumio generates a lot of security analytics, which customers then use in their own security operations system. “So you may see us build more around the analytics piece, which we may do ourselves or together with partners,” Cohen said.
