Balbix, a US-based provider of cybersecurity posture automation technology, received $70m yesterday in a series C round backed by Singtel Innov8, the corporate venturing arm of telecommunications company Singtel.
Redline Capital led the round, which also featured Third Point Ventures, Nautilus Venture Partners, Modern Venture Partners, Mayfield, Franklin Park, JC2 Ventures, Mubadala Capital and Alter Venture Partners.
Founded in 2015, Balbix uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to automate cybersecurity functions like cloud asset inventory and vulnerability management. It will use the funding to strengthen its engineering and go-to-market capabilities.
Funding and deals for corporate-backed cybersecurity technology providers explicitly using AI has been steadily rising over the past decade.
There were a total of two deals in 2011 with a combined value of $1.6m but six deals so far since the beginning of this year, totalling $212m in size, according to Pitchbook data.
The past two years have seen an especially significant increase in deal size, with $1.47bn being invested across 45 rounds in 2020 and $2.88bn across 47 rounds in 2021.
The largest recent round was the $450m secured by Socure, an authentication technology developer which uses AI and machine learning predictive tools to check users’ identities, in a November 2021 series E round backed by financial services firms Citi, Santander, Capital One and Wells Fargo.
Deep Instinct, a company using machine learning to identify cyberattacks and which counts corporates LG, Samsung, HP and Nvidia as investors, closed a $167m series D round in July 2021 while fellow machine learning-equipped cybersecurity software developer Tessian completed a $74m series C featuring Citi Ventures and Okta Ventures the following month.
Gaurav Banga, founder and chief executive of Balbix, said: “Our series C funding round underscores the unique value that the Balbix Security Cloud is bringing to our customers by helping them to unify and coordinate their existing security investments, automate cybersecurity posture and reduce their cyber risk and security programme costs.”
Balbix’s latest round marks the first time in nearly four years the company has raised money, following a $20m series B round in 2018 led by Singtel Innov8 that also featured Mubadala Ventures, Mayfield and various individuals. It had come out of stealth the previous year with $8.6m in series A funding from Mayfield.
