Cylance, a US-based endpoint cybersecurity software producer backed by corporates Dell, TenEleven, Citi and Capital One, completed a $120m round yesterday led by investment firm Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities unit.
The series E round included undisclosed additional investors and increased the total raised by Cylance to $297m since it was founded in 2012.
Cylance has developed a cybersecurity platform called CylanceProtect, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to assess whether code is potentially harmful through a process it calls Perpetual Prevention, predicting cyber attacks and preventing them from taking place.
The funding will be used to expand the company’s product range, to accelerate sales, marketing and development activities, and to grow the business in the Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific regions.
The round followed a $100m series D round closed by Cylance in mid-2016 that was co-led by another Blackstone vehicle, Blackstone Opportunities Fund, and Insight Venture Partners, and backed by financial services firm Citi’s corporate venturing unit, Citi Ventures, and undisclosed existing investors.
Cylance had raised $35m from Blackstone, Fairhaven Capital, Khosla Ventures and various angel investors across two rounds when it added $42m in a 2015 series C featuring corporate venturing vehicles Dell Ventures, Capital One Ventures and TenEleven Ventures.
The units, subsidiaries of computing equipment maker Dell, financial services provider Capital One and cybersecurity software provider TenEleven, were joined by DFJ Growth, which led the round, Blackstone, Khosla, Fairhaven, KKR, Thomvest and Draper Nexus.
Stuart McClure, chief executive of Cylance, said: “Cylance has proven that artificial intelligence can defend against cybersecurity problems that were previously thought impossible to prevent.
“With the most advanced application of AI in endpoint security, Cylance products continuously learn and improve over time, enabling customers to achieve a state of ‘Perpetual Prevention’ and creating a simple silence on the endpoint.”