Best Tech News Site: Corelight secures $75M Series D to bolster its network defense offering

Thursday, September 2, 2021

Corelight secures $75M Series D to bolster its network defense offering

Corelight, a San Francisco-based startup that claims to offer the industry’s first open network detection and response (NDR) platform, has raised $75 million in Series D investment led by Energy Impact Partners.

The round — which also includes a strategic investment from Capital One Ventures, Crowdstrike Falcon Fund and Gaingels — brings Corelight’s total raised to $160 million, following a $50 million Series C in October 2019, a $25 million Series B in September 2018, and a $9.2 million Series A in July 2017.

While it’s raised plenty of capital in the past few years, the startup isn’t planning its exit just yet. Brian Dye, CEO of Corelight, tells TechCrunch that given Corelight’s market opportunity and performance — the startup claims to be the fastest-growing NDR player at scale — it plans to invest in growth and expects to raise additional capital in the future.

“Public listing timeframes are always hard to forecast, and we view the private markets as attractive in the short term, so we expect to remain private for the next couple years and will look at market conditions then to decide our next step,” Dye said, adding that the Corelight plans to use its latest investment to fuel the acceleration of its global market presence and to develop new data and cloud-based offerings.

“Aside from go-to-market expansion, we are investing to ensure that the insight we provide both continues to lead the industry and can be readily used by customers of all types,” he added.

Corelight, which competes with the likes of FireEye and STG-owned McAfee, was founded in 2013 when Dr. Vern Paxson, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, joined forces with Robin Sommer and Seth Hall to build a network visibility solution on top of an open-source framework called Zeek (formerly Bro).

Paxson began developing Zeek in 1995 when he was working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). The software is now widely regarded as the gold standard for both network security monitoring and network traffic analysis and has been deployed by thousands of organizations around the world, including the U.S. Department of Energy, various agencies in the U.S. government, and research universities like Indiana University, Ohio State, and Stanford.