Cyber security provider Tanium has become one of the largest ever investments made by Andreessen Horowitz, as part of efforts to raise more money to expand outside the US.
Tanium's technology has been adopted by half of the top 10 global banks and four of the top 10 retailers. Essentially it has created a way to reach every computer in a network of hundreds of thousands within 15 seconds, enabling almost instantaneous updates and instructions.
The Bay Area-based start-up is raising $52m from the venture capitalists Andreessen, on top of a $90m investment from the same company last year, as it seeks to open international offices.
Sales at Tanium have risen 400 per cent year-on-year and the company, unusually for a Silicon Valley start-up, is profitable. It plans to use the extra funds to open up to 15 offices overseas and it is also developing the platform by adding more features to help it respond to security incidents.
Orion Hindawi, co-founder and chief technical officer, said Tanium's distribution system was the only one of its kind that "isn't 30-year old rewarmed technology".
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>"Most of our customers before Tanium had no idea how many computers they had, forget about what they are doing," he said. "One chief information officer said he had between 100,000 and 200,000 computers. If that is the level of granularity of data you are working from, of course you will not find out for a long time when something goes wrong." Andreessen Horowitz said the investment is one of its largest ever.
Steven Sinofsky, a partner at the firm, said the company wanted to increase its investment in Tanium because it is at the "modern crossroads of systems management and security".
Funds are flooding into cyber security start-ups as venture capitalists bet that high profile attacks such as the breach at Sony Pictures and Anthem, the health insurer, will push boards into increasing their cyber security budgets.
Incumbent security companies such as McAfee, owned by Intel, and Symantec have struggled to keep up with the changing methods of hackers, who on average spend 229 days inside a company's computer network before being discovered, according to a 2014 threat report from Mandiant.
Venture capital funding for cyber security soared by more than a third in 2014 to $2.3bn from the year before, according to data from research company PrivCo.
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