Devo Raises Another $100M To Grow Sales Operations

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company has now raised more than $500 million since its founding

Despite signs of worsening economic conditions and layoffs at other cybersecurity startups, Devo Technology has announced it has raised an additional $100 million in funding, boosting its valuation to $2 billion.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based Devo Technology, a cloud-native logging and security analytics company, said it plans to use the money to geographically expand sales operations, further develop its autonomous Security Operations Center (SOC), and pursue possible acquisitions.

The latest Series F funding was led by Eurazeo, a global investment firm with over $30 billion in assets under management. The firm’s existing investors -- Insight Partners, Georgian, TCV, General Atlantic, Bessemer Venture Partners and Kibo Ventures -- also participated. ISAI Cap Venture provided a strategic investment in the round.

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The late-stage Devo, which has 500 employees, has now raised a total of more than $500 million in funding since its founding in 2011.

Devo’s funding announcement came on the same morning that Cybereason, a high-flying cybersecurity company that’s raised $325 million over the past year, announced it was laying off 10 percent of its workforce.

And Devo’s announcement comes a week after cloud-security firm Lacework, which raised $1.3 billion last year, announced it was slashing its workforce by 20 percent.

But Marc van Zadelhoff, CEO of Devo, expressed gratitude towards his firm’s backers.

“We’re thrilled to have instilled such confidence in our investors that they continue to support our innovation and the value we deliver to customers,” van Zadelhoff said in a statement. “Security teams are facing more threats than ever—regardless of industry or geography—and that challenge is compounded by the difficulty hiring and retaining talent and a lack of visibility into the full attack surface and the speed and scale necessary to keep up with not just growing threats, but the growth of their organizations.”

In a statement, Guillaume d‘Audiffret, managing director at Eurazeo, said Devo has “proven to be a disruptive force in the security analytics market” and could “fundamentally change the way organizations secure their data.”

He added: “(Devo) is setting a pace for innovation that will enable its customers to meet the ever-growing challenges facing security teams and we look forward to continuing our work together.”

In an interview with CRN, van Zadelhoff didn’t disclose his firm’s revenue numbers, but he said business nearly doubled last year as the company added major customers such as Sonos, AT&T and Unisys.

He said about 60 percent of Devo’s U.S. sales are through the channel. “It’s been a big part of our (growth),” he said.

Now Devo is planning to push sales in the Asia-Pacific region, where channel contacts are even more important, he said.

Besides organic growth for Devo, van Zadelhoff made clear that Devo is still in the hunt for more acquisitions, following the firm’s April acquisition of Kognos, an automous threat hunting company.

The Kognos acquisition was aimed at helping Devo push toward development of its so-called “autonomous SOC,” or a security operations center that relies less on human analysts and more on machine-learning and AI tools to sift through data for potential cyberthreats and compliance problems.