GuardiCore, an Israel-based provider of security software for data centres, secured $20m today in a series B round backed by Cisco Investments, networking equipment manufacturer Cisco’s corporate venturing unit.
Venture capital firms Battery Ventures and 83North co-led the round, which increased GuardiCore’s overall funding to $33m. Both firms previously contributed to the company’s $11m series A round in August 2014.
Founded in 2013, GuardiCore’s Centra platform provides a cyber threat detection and response service tailored to data centre providers, and can be used for a variety of data centres including virtualised servers, software defined networks, containers, and private and public cloud infrastructures.
The company will spend the funding on research and development, sales and marketing, and to expand its global ecosystem and channel partners in order to distribute its software more widely. It will also look to further strengthen core security controls across its infrastructure platforms.
Pavel Gurvich, CEO of GuardiCore, said: “The complex and dynamic nature of modern data centres, along with very high traffic rates, demands that today’s organisations re-evaluate their data centre security architecture to incorporate application-layer visibility, granular micro-segmentation, real-time detection and automated response.
“Currently deployed in enterprise data centres globally, our GuardiCore Centra security platform provides these capabilities for the enterprise and is rapidly gaining momentum as a platform level solution for the detection, investigation and mitigation of data centre threats in real-time, reducing exposure, risk and cost.”