Startup Skybox to Raise $10M

Security startup Skybox Security Inc. will soon announce $10.1 million in Series C funding, bringing the companys total funding to over $20 million.

Ed Cooper, Skybox’s vice president of worldwide marketing, told NDCF that the funding will be announced sometime this month, although he was unwilling to provide specific details on the firms involved. However, he did confirm that existing Skybox backers took part in the round.

The Series C would be Skybox’s largest round to date, following the $6 million raised by the company in 2003 and $5 million in 2002. The Series B round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and included Benchmark Capital, Carmel Ventures, and Mofet Technology Fund.

Steve Hunt, research director at analyst firm Forrester Research Inc., is not surprised by the money rolling in to Skybox. “They have found a niche [in the security market] where there is insufficient technology and created an entirely new approach to solving the problem,” he says.

The problem in question is identifying new security threats such as worm attacks. Traditional intrusion-and-prevention systems rely on a signature to identify an attack, but many users are struggling to deal with new, unknown threats whose signature is not yet known (see Security Approaches Day Zero).Skybox’s core offering is Skybox View, an application that draws information from a range of data center devices such as firewalls, routers, and switches. This is then used to simulate the impact of possible attacks, both known and unknown, via a GUI (graphical user interface). “Basically, their product envisages different security scenarios on user networks and suggests remediation,” says Hunt.

Last month the vendor extended the product’s ability to simulate attacks and also introduced new features geared towards facilitating compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley (see Skybox Simulates Worm Attack ).

So, who are Skybox? The company was founded in 2002 by Gidi Cohen, a former officer in the Israeli military’s intelligence corps. Prior to Skybox, Cohen was the co-founder and CEO of Vigil Technologies, which developed analysis tools.

Cohen’s co-founder at Skybox is Moshe Meiseles, a former senior vice president at Memco Software, which was acquired by Platinum Technology in 1999. Platinum was itself acquired by Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA) shortly thereafter. Like Cohen, Meiseles also has a background in the Israeli military, serving as the head of the Systems and Performance Department in the armed forces’ Computer Center.

Cooper told NDCF that the Series C round will be spent primarily on research and marketing, as the company pushes towards breakeven. “Our long-term plan is that, in the first half of 2006, we will turn the breakeven point.”Skybox has 65 employees split among its Palo Alto, Calif., HQ and offices in the U.K. and Israel.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-Gen Data Center Forum