At Sapphire Ventures, when we think of investing in “companies of consequence” we look for large market spaces, emerging and disruptive technologies, and companies with clear value propositions. Today we are excited to announce our co-lead investment with Lightspeed Venture Partners in Exabeam, a San Mateo, CA based company changing the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) space with Smarts!
The SIEM market is mature and very competitive, so why should everyone being paying attention? The greatest challenge today is effective detection and response to targeted attacks and breaches. The effective use of data, behavior profiling and analytics (UEBA) can improve detection success, and Exabeam pioneered the usage of UEBA methods. Today, Exabeam is a widely-deployed UEBA solution with industry-leading behavioral modeling and machine learning capabilities. In the last few years the company has also become a leading SIEM vendor being named a leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management.
Effective response is just as important as the detection of incidents. Exabeam’s Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) solution allows teams to respond to security incidents rapidly and with less effort than ever before using playbooks and prebuilt APIs that integrate all the IT and security tools for an automatic response. The problem of effective response is so large that despite the legacy solutions in the market, the President has signed an Executive Order directing the creation of programs to grow and strengthen the cybersecurity workforce to help fill the estimated 300,000 cybersecurity job vacancies in the U.S. and 2,000,000 on a worldwide basis.
Great companies are built by great people, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Nir Polak, Domingo Mihovilovic and Sylvain Gil, who have a proven track record of building successful companies.
To close, I wanted to highlight how the founders came up with the company name. When they started the company, they knew they would have to process a lot of data, and they set out to find interesting patterns contained within that data. This is how the company got its name Exabeam, a combination of ‘exabyte’ and ‘light beam’. We are thrilled to partner with Exabeam on their journey to shed light on the next exabyte of security data.
