Illumio provides zero-trust security through microsegmentation to protect data centers, cloud networks and applications. The company says its approach makes it easier to manage and contain breaches, and more than 10% of Fortune 100 companies, including Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas and Salesforce, use its technology. Founded in 2013 and based in California, Illumio saw 100% international growth during the pandemic and is broadening its customer base across industries. It has raised more than $550 million to date from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and Formation 8. Illumio plans to use the new funding to invest heavily in field operations, its channel partner network, and to fund innovation, engineering and product development. Founder Andrew Rubin declined to commit to an IPO timeline. Illumio provides segmented security to help customers prevent the lateral spread of breaches across their infrastructures. The company recently obtained FIPS 140-2 certification, allowing its software to run on federal government networks of low classification. Its customer roster includes BNP Paribas, Morgan Stanley, Oracle NetSuite and Salesforce. Illumio said the $65 million will be used across the business to support expansion into Europe, the Middle East and Africa (where its headcount has grown significantly), as well as Asia and the U.S., where its headquarters is located. The company has raised more than $330 million to date across five funding rounds, and its prior Series D in mid-2017 was reported to be $125 million with a valuation said to be upwards of $1 billion. Illumio also announced executive hires including Anup Singh as CFO and Jonathan Reiber as head of cybersecurity strategy, and added angel investor John Hinshaw to its board. The company is listed among anticipated IPOs but did not comment on IPO plans. Illumio’s core product delivers adaptive segmentation to monitor, contain and protect workloads across data centers and the cloud, offering both detailed protections and a “network MRI” for visibility. The company substitutes automated software intelligence for manual segmentation work, allowing mapping and control at large scale. Typical deployments segment and secure around 10,000 workloads (one customer secured 32,000), and the company reports bookings grew 400% between its first and second years of business. Customers include nine of the 15 largest U.S. financial companies and four of the seven largest SaaS businesses, with a considerable number of seven-figure deals. Illumio does not disclose revenues and is not yet profitable. It plans to use the new capital to expand business development, R&D and customer support and says it is focused on building a long-term, standalone and potentially public company. Illumio provides a software-only security platform that effectively wraps firewall-like controls around individual applications and processes, wherever they run — in data centers or public and private clouds. Its approach uses whitelisting and real-time visibility to block unauthorized communications and surface anomalies, which the company likens to an "MRI" of a customer's environment. The product integrates with infrastructure such as NGINX and F5 load balancers for dynamic policy enforcement. Founded in January 2013 and based in Sunnyvale, Illumio spent nearly two years in stealth while signing early paying customers and iterating the product. The company reports hundreds of customers, including Plantronics, NTT, Creative Artists Agency and Morgan Stanley, and is generating significant revenue. As part of its growth plans, Illumio intends to roll out more formal international operations, open an office in Asia by the end of the year, and double headcount to about 200. Illumio is a Santa Clara, CA-based stealth security startup. The company is currently in stealth mode and has not disclosed detailed product specifics. According to General Catalyst partner Steve Herrod, Illumio’s stated focus is making application protection independent of where an application is running or what infrastructure it is running on. Leadership includes Andrew Rubin, PJ Kirner, Ben Verghese, Alan Cohen, Matthew Glenn and Alan Stokol. Financially, Illumio closed a $34M Series B funding round announced on 20 September 2013. The round was led by General Catalyst Partners, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Formation 8.

Total raised

$549M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Series F

Latest activity

Jun 2021