- Network traffic analysis (NTA) solutions company Corelight recently announced it raised $50 million in Series C led by Insight Partners and Accel
Corelight — the providers of the most powerful network traffic analysis (NTA) solutions for cybersecurity — announced it raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Insight Partners and Accel. With this funding round, the company is going to accelerate investments in product development, research, sales, and marketing with the objective of delivering new capabilities for network defense.
“What makes our data first security approach so powerful is the global community behind it,” said Gregory Bell, CEO of Corelight. “That community generously contributes new detections, parsers, and other capabilities for the benefit of all defenders. In addition to helping Corelight accelerate commercial progress, the new investment will enable us to engage and serve our community at a higher level. Belief in this joint vision is a key driver for the partnership with Insight and Accel, two renowned and experienced firms.”
Corelight was launched by Dr. Vern Paxson (a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and Chief Scientist at Corelight), Robin Sommer (CTO) and Seth Hall (Chief Evangelist) with a goal of delivering network visibility solutions for cybersecurity built on an open-source framework called Zeek (formerly known as Bro). Paxson had started developing Zeek in 1995 when he was working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). And the software is now considered the standard for both NSM and network traffic analysis (NTA). And it has been deployed by thousands of organizations around the world.
“Zeek is an important element of our network security posture and we’re excited to see what future capabilities unfold,” commented Joe Sullivan, CSO at Cloudflare.
Corelight amplified the power of Zeek with a suite of enterprise features that drastically simplifies enterprise deployments so organizations can spend more time on threat hunting and less time on system administration.
This includes out-of-the-box enterprise integrations, distributed sensor management, and data tuning capabilities that can reduce the downstream SIEM costs by 30% or more compared to a typical open source deployment. And Corelight sensors are available in physical, virtual or cloud-based form factors to help fit the needs of customers’ network environments.
Now Corelight is being used in production by some of the world’s largest organizations in both the public and private sectors.
“Corelight recognizes that network data provides ground-truth evidence that security teams need to root out malicious activity inside their organizations,” added Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Partners. “It is this unique data-centric approach that sets Corelight apart from other vendors in the security market space. As a result, we believe that Corelight has substantial opportunities to expand their portfolio and provide customers a fundamentally better foundation for their security programs. We look forward to partnering with the team as they build out that vision.”
Including this round, Corelight has raised a total of $84 million to date. Some of Corelight’s investors include General Catalyst, Accel, Osage University Partners and Riverbed Technology Co-founder Dr. Steve McCanne. And the company has more than doubled in size since its Series B in September 2018.
“Corelight has quickly established itself as one of the foundational companies within network security with its passionate community of open source users and traction within some of the most discerning enterprise security teams globally,” explained John Locke, partner at Accel. “We’re thrilled to double-down on our investment and excited about the growth ahead.”
