RedSeal back from the brink with $17 million of new investment
It's not clear what went wrong with RedSeal, founded in 2004 to sell firewall management, but judging from comments made during the firm's turnaround, by 2013 the company was rapidly running out of customers and cash.
In February 2014, investor and notable Ray Rothrock took over as CEO and set about rearranging the furniture, overhauling the management and started adding features to its security analytics platform.
Now re-pointed as 'cybersecurity analytics', investors have sunk a Series C round of funding into the firm to keep up the momentum, with Tyco, MATH Venture Partners, Pallasite Ventures, DRW the new names with a number of old investors back for another helping.
"This additional funding enables us to increase our engineering capabilities and expand our footprint both domestically and overseas," said Rothrock in the re-launch press release.
"I've been in the cybersecurity field for 22 years, and as an investor I've been involved with 18 security startups," said Rothrock. "The essence of a good company, especially in the ever-changing field of technology, is to provide innovative solutions that meet not only the current market needs but those that are still over the horizon."
Cloud connectivity is a new feature for the platform, with a few new tweaks such as a smartphone app, IPv6 support, a policy template manager. The company also touts what it calls 'layer 2' discovery, which we take to mean it can see what it going on at LAN level as well as higher up the stack.
The problem, as ever, will be competing in a security space that has become incredibly crowded with competitive jargon-infused 'answers' to the cybersecurity problem.
With money in investors' pockets, re-launches are a good idea. Another example would be the renaming last September of Verdasys to the more prosaic but easier to spell Digital Guardian.
Private equity money is also finding its way into takeovers of middle-tier security firms, such as Bain Capital's March purchase of Blue Coat with rival Websense also said to be up for sale.