San Francisco mobile security company Lookout nabbed a $150 million investment, the largest funding round raised by a security company this year.
The investment exceeds all previous funding rounds combined for Lookout; the company has now raised more than $280 million since its founding in 2007, according to Crunchbase.
The funding round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates, and included participation from a mix of investment banking and venture capital groups, including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
The mega deal highlights the widespread concern about cybersecurity, particularly on mobile devices, which more people are using for work as well as in their personal lives. Nearly 80 percent of companies support smartphones in the workplace, and the number of mobile phones at work will hit nearly 1 billion by 2017, according to Lookout, so employees are increasingly accessing sensitive corporate information and vital business data on their mobile devices. Lookout uses a cloud-based platform, predictive analytics and machine learning to track mobile application use and catch malicious and anomalous behavior. Lookout’s software can counter security threats, often before they put data, devices and networks at risk.
Experts are increasingly concerned that the number of attacks will rise as more workers use smartphones in lieu of PCs to conduct business. And that concern is valid, as cybercrime appears to be outpacing many security efforts — this month, a Russian gang stole 1.2 billion user names and passwords and more than 500 million email addresses from 420,000 websites in what appears to be the largest data breach ever. The attack followed multiple reports of previous cyber assaults, including the high-profile data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus last holiday season. The U.S. economy is losing twice the amount of money each year in security breaches than the amount being invested in IT security technology, according to Lookout.
“Data is less secure than ever, and anxiety has created widespread demand for genuine transparency and control,” Ajay Royan, co-founder Mithril Capital Management, one of the investos, said in a prepared statement.
Lookout was founded in San Francisco in 2007 by hackers John Hering, Kevin Mahaffey and James Burgess, and run by CEO Jim Dolce.
Photo: Kevin Mahaffey, co-founder and chief technology officer of Lookout. Courtesy Lookout.
