CyberX, an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and industrial control system (ICS) security company, announced it raised $18 million in a strategic round of funding led by Qualcomm Ventures LLC and Inven Capital. Existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Glilot Capital Partners, Flint Capital, and OurCrowd also participated in this round. Including this round, CyberX has raised a total of $48 million.
And this round of funding will enable CyberX to further capitalize its market leadership position by expanding its go-to-market footprint, innovative product development, and IIoT threat intelligence capabilities.
CyberX was founded by military cyber experts CTO and EMEA GM Nir Giller and CEO Omer Schneider in 2013. They have a proven track record of defending critical infrastructure from nation-state attacks.
“The backing we’ve received from new and existing investors is clear validation of both the massive market opportunity and CyberX’s proven ability to execute,” said Schneider in a statement. “We’re thrilled to have seasoned investors like Qualcomm Ventures and Inven Capital join our team as we continue growing the company at triple-digit rates.”
This funding round comes at a time when CyberX has been experiencing rapid customer growth across all industrial and critical infrastructure sectors like energy, oil and gas, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, mining, building management, etc.
“Our societies and global economy rely on a dependable supply of energy, water, food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, metals, and transportation,” added Giller. “We have a unique opportunity to leverage our differentiated technology and world-class expertise to secure the critical infrastructure supply chain upon which our modern world depends.”
The growth is being driven by heightened board-level awareness of the business risks posed by digital transformation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). While these key initiatives are providing new levels of global productivity and efficiency, it is also driving deployment of billions of new IIoT devices and pervasive connectivity between IT and Operational Technology (OT) networks. And this increases the attack surface and risk of costly downtime.
“We believe CyberX has the right management team, deep domain expertise, and scalable technology to address the needs of the world’s largest and most complex enterprises,” explained Qualcomm Israel Ltd. director and Qualcomm Ventures investment director Boaz Peer. “We’re delighted to join as an investor given Qualcomm’s strong interest in Industrial IoT and our ability to provide connectivity, compute and security solutions for this market.”
CyberX’s agentless platform enables organizations to continuously auto-discover unmanaged IIoT devices and monitor their OT networks for destructive cyberattacks like WannaCry, NotPetya, and TRITON. Plus it can integrate with customers’ existing IT security stacks like Splunk, IBM Security, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, RSA NetWitness, ServiceNow, etc. And CyberX’s customers include 2 out of the top 5 U.S. energy providers, a top 5 global pharmaceutical company, a top 5 U.S. chemical company, and national electric and gas utilities across Europe and Asia-Pacific.
“We live in an era where everything is becoming digital and connected and even critical infrastructure is being managed digitally,” Inven Capital investment director and member of the board Viktor Miskovsky commented. “This brings a need for an industrial cybersecurity solution that is sophisticated yet simple to deploy and use. We believe that CyberX has the right mix of talent, superior technology, and experienced investors to be the leader in this field.”
