Tanium, a US-based cybersecurity software provider backed by financial services firm Citi’s strategic investment arm Citi Ventures, secured $100m yesterday in a round led by TPG Growth.
TPG Growth, a subsidiary of private equity group TPG, was joined by existing investors, though only venture capital firm IVP was named. The round, comprising an issue of common rather than preferred stock, valued Tanium at $3.75bn.
Tanium has built a software offering that helps enterprises monitor millions of endpoints, detecting any issues and enabling them to make changes quickly if necessary.
Most of the proceeds will go to providing liquidity to early employees and investors including co-founder and executive chairman Orion Hindawi, who, the company said in a press release, intends to use the proceeds to fund his various charitable endeavours.
The deal came a month after a report in Bloomberg alleged that Hindawi had fired several employees just before they would have been able to cash in their stock options, and several key executives have left the company in the past year.
Tanium has now raised $407m in total from backers including Citi Ventures, the company said, though it has not released details regarding when the unit invested.
The company’s other investors include VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, which provided $142m across two rounds in 2014 and 2015, Geodesic Capital, T. Rowe Price and Franklin Templeton Investments.
Hindawi said: “Investors are understandably tired of funding cybersecurity companies whose offerings have very short shelf lives as their point solution approach is nullified by the changing attack landscape.
“Tanium is unique in our industry. In contrast to the cybersecurity-only companies, we provide an endpoint platform that allows communication for massive numbers of assets in a way enterprises have never had before, which is useful across not only security but also operations issues in IT.”