Axonius, one of the world’s biggest players in enterprise asset management — understanding and monitoring the digital assets and infrastructure that make up an organization’s network — has raised $200 million in additional funding to expand its operations on the heels of the company’s growth. The company, nearly five years after launch, is on track for more than $100 million in ARR with about 500 large enterprises among its customers.
The investment is made jointly by Lightspeed and Accel and comes in the form of an expansion to Axonius existing Series E of $200 million; led by Accel on its own — an investment it raised almost two years ago to the day. By extension, the valuation also remains stable at $2.6 billion. (Before that, the company raised a $100 million round in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation.)
Neither investor commented on why Axonius or they chose to run this additional equity financing as an extension rather than a new Series F, but it’s not uncommon at this time to see even healthy startups raise at more conservative valuations, especially when the rounds are later, investments in the development stage.
“I haven’t felt the need to raise the valuation since the last round,” CEO and founder Dean Sysman said when asked about the decision.
“I never optimize the valuation when we get close to a funding round. We’re optimizing for the best thing for the company long-term, and we see ourselves as a very, very long-term strategy because of the size of our problem and the market it’s addressing,” he said.
Despite the business stranglehold taking place on IT and technology budgets in general, the addressable market that Sysman refers to has only grown over the years.
One of the most important aspects of a strong cybersecurity strategy today is attack surface awareness: understanding the assets and services and interactions that exist on a network is key to protecting malicious actors from entering it.
This is easier said than done in today’s business world. The rise of cloud services, containerization, big data analytics, microservices, a multitude of connected devices and workplaces — including some with no human involvement at all — and a host of legacy operations running alongside all of these are just a few from the developments that define the way we work today. All together create a complex, and usually non-static, “region” that represents the myriad ways a malicious hacker can enter a network and cause damage.
Axonius is one of a group of specialist companies building platforms to help manage this issue. In Axonius’ case, it provides what Sysman called “as close to real-time as possible” snapshots of what the network looks like at any given point. Shut up is the realistic and operative word here: Axonius covers everything on-premises and in the cloud or elsewhere on the network, but some products and services just don’t provide real-time data. “We’re really dependent on the data sources we get,” he said.
From there, it provides tools to detect when that instance has changed, and then recommendations on what actions to take as a result. There are some companies that aim to provide this information for data management or regulatory compliance or to better track software spend (e.g. Xensam focuses mainly on software components rather than endpoints and Vertice on management expenses). Axonius’ primary focus is cybersecurity.
Companies that have signed on so far include Schneider Electric, News Corp and Anheuser-Busch InBev, and the plan for New York-based Axonius is to use the investment both to continue improving the platform and to to expand into new markets.
Accel and Lightspeed declined to be interviewed for this story, but Lightspeed gave us a single quote in response to several questions we had.
“We’ve been a long-time Axonius partner and love to double down on our best-performing companies. Axonios clearly fits the bill. Their growth trajectory speaks for itself – they are one of the fastest cyber companies to hit $100M ARR, reach 1,000 platform integrations and have evolved over the years from a single product asset management company to a broader management platform that controls an entire enterprise digital footprint, be it assets, software, SaaS and more,” said Arsham Memarzadeh, Partner at Lightspeed. “They are well on their way to becoming a household name for any cyber or IT buyer.”
