Illumio goes to the well for $105 million more in venture funding
That brings its venture funding to $142.5 million, and the company plans to double its employees in 12 months from about 95 today, says the company's Chief Commercial Office Alan Cohen.
That's quite a bundle for a two-year-old company in the crowded network security arena where its Adaptive Security Platform (ASP) imposes policies on virtual and hardware servers, workloads and now even processes.
The idea has caught the eye and wallets of high profile investors and tech luminaries including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Formation 8, Data Collective as well as individual investors including Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. The new round of funding adds BlackRock Funds and Accel Partners to the venture capital list.
Microsoft Chairman John Thompson, who used to run Symantec, sits on Illumio's board. It boasts Morgan Stanley, Plantronics, Creative Artists Agency, Yahoo and NTT I3 among its initial customers.
The company sells Adaptive Security Platform (ASP), a data-center/cloud security platform that imposes individual security policies on every process. Those policies apply to any machine real or virtual - that uses the process, so they apply no matter where they reside data center, private clouds or public clouds.
Formerly ASP supported policies down to the workload level and enforced the policies via its Virtual Enforcement Node deployed on every database, Web and application server in a network.
Now the company is extending the reach of its policy engine to the BIG-IP product line from F5 Networks, making F5 gear act as enforcement points for ASP. The mechanism behind the F5 integration is an F5 iRule. iRules are scripts that enable directing traffic running through BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager.
The companies plan to extend ASP's reach further to include BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager for enforcement.
Illumio company is trying to broaden its sales reach with new offices in Singapore and London to augment its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. It is working to "fire up the channel" to get the product in front of more customers as well, Cohen says.