Opswat expands infrastructure protection with anti-malware tools, raises $125M

Infrastructure protection services company Opswat today announced that it raised $125 million from Brighton Park Capital, the startup’s first external funding round. Opswat says the capital will support its R&D and hiring efforts as it looks to acquire new customers.

More than three quarters of IT security leaders anticipate a major breach involving a critical infrastructure organization in the near future, according to a Black Hat USA survey. It’s estimated that 31% of organizations have experienced cyberattacks on operational technology infrastructure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gartner found that organizations planned to invest $17.48 billion in infrastructure protection in 2020.

San Francisco, California-based Opswat, which was founded in 2002,  protects critical infrastructure by attempting to eliminate malware and zero-day attacks. Its products focus on threat prevention and process creation for secure data transfer and safe device access. Toward this end, Opswat offers two platforms — MetaDefender for threat prevention and MetaAccess for cloud access control and endpoint compliance.

MetaDefender leverages what Opswat calls content disarm and reconstruction — “deep CDR” – to remove threats from files by reconstructing the files while stripping out potentially malicious content. The platform also delivers multiscanning with over 30 antimalware engines, file-based vulnerability assessment, and proactive data loss prevention technologies, which spot and redact sensitive information like names, companies, subjects, GPS locations, authors, and more in emails and other messages.

As for MetaAccess, it allows access to software-as-a-service apps and cloud data based on device health and compliance, helping to block potentially risky devices.

MetaAccess and MetaDefender draw on Opswat’s endpoint compliance technology, which detects and classifies over 5,000 apps to enable monitoring, management, and real-time remediation. It’s complemented by anti-keylogger and screen capture prevention features that intercept and conceal keystrokes from malware and block unauthorized screengrabs by users, web collaboration tools, and apps.

Opswat competes with Confluera, Erikos, IP Access, and others in a global cybersecurity market that’s valued at over $156.5 billion. But Opswat claims to have over 1,000 customers, including IBM, Comcast, American Express, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and 98% of U.S. nuclear power facilities. The company recently announced that its channel partner program now covers over 40 countries and will expand by 50% this year.

Opswat would appear to be primed for growth when taking into account the recent spate of attacks on critical infrastructure including electricity, gas, and water systems,. Just last month, hackers attempted to poison a Florida city water supply by remotely accessing a server. And in 2015 and 2016, cyberattacks caused large-scale power outages in Ukraine.

Founder and CEO Benny Czarny claims Opswat’s revenue grew 40% from 2019 to 2020 while annual recurring revenue hit 30%. With “record sales” in 2020, he says that Opswat intends to be ready for a stock market offering by 2021, which would make it among the first companies focused on infrastructure protection to go public.

“Opswat’s mission is to protect the world’s critical infrastructure. This is an extremely important objective since it literally means helping ensure people worldwide can continue their daily lives uninterrupted,” Czarny told VentureBeat via email. “While we have built an amazing business over the past 18 years, I realize a financial partner can help us accelerate our progress toward achieving our mission.”

Opswat employs over 400 employees across its 10 offices worldwide. Last December, the company relocated its headquarters to Tampa, Florida and plans to hire 100 employees in the city over the next three years.

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