eSentire, a Waterloo Region cybersecurity company that's been growing explosively since 2013, just achieved another milestone: US$19.5 million in fresh investment from a partnership between Edison Partners, Georgian Partners, Cisco Investments, Northleaf Ventures Catalyst Fund, and Information Venture Partners II, LP. This investment tips eSentire's total funds raised over $40 million.
The investment is for eSentire to expand the business – establishing a new security operations centre in 2016 – while increasing its marketing reach and investing in its partner program. Right now, eSentire employs about 250 people in the UK, US, Ireland and Canada, with the majority working in Canada. The company aims to grow to more than 300 people by the end of 2016, and is actively hiring new staff for its expanding Cambridge headquarters.
The investment comes off of a big year for eSentire. In 2015, the company opened a European office in Cork, Ireland, that it plans to fill with 100 staff in the next five years. In June, Gartner Research began covering eSentire's “Continuous Advanced Threat Protection” as a best-practices framework for protecting against egregious cyber attacks, making it a new industry standard in cybersecurity.
eSentire’s approach to the cybersecurity game is eccentric, disrupting legacy security companies by putting an ancient piece of technology at the forefront of their business: the human brain.
The human-forward approach helps eSentire “protect high-risk assets from complex threats that technology alone can miss,” says eSentire CEO J. Paul Haynes. “We offer clients real eyes-on-glass monitoring 24x7 and it works. This investment recognizes our success and will help us to continue to expand our reach to protect even more clients.”
Having human operators constantly monitoring the $2.5 trillion in assets under management that eSentire protects allows eSentire to combine behaviour-based analytics, immediate mitigation and advanced threat intelligence. It also helps the company stay on top of new techniques devised by hackers and cybercriminals, since a human agent is always watching.
Edison Partners, the firm that led this round of investment, is returning to eSentire after previous investments.
“Its impressive year over year growth outshines the vast majority of investment opportunities," said Lenard Marcus, a Partner at Edison. “eSentire and its leadership team continue to prove their ability to innovate and effectively mitigate threats for its clients and it’s apparent their success isn’t slowing down.”
