Arctic Wolf Networks (AWN), a leading security operations center (SOC)-as-a-service company, today announced it has raised US$45 million in series C funding, led by Future Fund with participation from new investors Adams Street and Unusual Ventures, as well as existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sonae Investment Management and Knollwood Investment Advisory LLC. To date, Arctic Wolf has raised $91.2 million. This new round validates the company’s leadership position during a period of exponential growth for the security services market. Gartner believes that “an increased focus on building detection and response capabilities, privacy regulations such as GDPR, and the need to address digital business risks are the main drivers for global security spending through 2019.”
Arctic Wolf, which has an engineering office in Waterloo, Ont., will use the new funding to accelerate company growth and meet the soaring demand for its SOC-as-a-service offering. Since its founding in 2012, Arctic Wolf has achieved a 219% year-over-year customer growth rate. To support this rapid expansion, the staff has more than doubled in the last year, increasing to 166 employees working across the company’s four North American offices, including a new location in Minneapolis.
“Our growing team of security engineers is redefining the economics of security to protect companies of all sizes,” said Brian NeSmith, CEO and co-founder of Arctic Wolf. “In addition to supporting continued company growth, the funding will accelerate expansion of our service offering, as we continue to scale and expand to meet our customers’ individualized needs. We look forward to continuing our momentum and building out our internal vulnerability assessment and endpoint detection and response capabilities, in particular.”
Arctic Wolf allows companies of all sizes to combat the cybersecurity skills shortage and cost-prohibitive nature of building their own SOC. In fact, a recent cost analysis from Frost & Sullivan revealed that organizations with few, if any, dedicated infosecurity personnel could spend up to nearly 10 times more over a three-year period building and operating their own SOC than if they implemented a SOC-as-a-service, such as Arctic Wolf’s AWN CyberSOC™ service.
The award-winning, turnkey SOC-as-a-Service installs in minutes and provides value from day one, delivering superior threat detection and fewer false positives by leveraging key innovations, including Concierge Security™ engineers and Hybrid AI, the merging of a security engineer’s intelligence and intuition with the efficiency and productivity of artificial intelligence.
In the June 2018 Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services, Gartner found “MDR services are filling the need of organizations of all sizes that lack internal security resources and expertise, and want to expand their investments beyond preventative security technologies to address their detection, response and 24/7 monitoring gaps.”
“Arctic Wolf is a uniquely differentiated service and addresses a need in the cybersecurity market that is not met by pure product companies,” said John Vrionis, Managing Partner at Unusual Ventures. “By focusing on the outcome of detection and response, the company is one of the few service providers that are able to deliver the end goal of securing an enterprise from cyberthreats.”
