CrowdStrike secured $100m in funding this week from Rackspace, Google among others

Security SaaS provider CrowdStrike completed a $100m round of funding led by Google and Rackspace this week, which the company said would be used to bolster its international expansion.

The funding round, in which Accel and Warburg Pincus also participated, brings the total investment secured by the firm to $156m.

CrowdStrike offers a range of threat intelligence, endpoint protections and cybersecurity services including a cloud-based software offering and a security operations centre -as-a-service.

The company, of which Rackspace is a customer, claims to have trebled billings revenue and employees year on year.

“It’s extremely gratifying to bring in a high-caliber investor like Google Capital which shares our passion for innovation and sees the opportunity to completely transform the security industry,” said George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

“As we continue to experience hyper-growth, this capital injection will help us firmly establish our SaaS-based endpoint protection platform as the leading solution to address today’s sophisticated attacks and will allow CrowdStrike to further accelerate our domestic and international expansion.”

The cloud-based security services market is growing along with enterprise adoption of cloud services in part because they can be deployed more quickly and flexibly than on-premise solutions, and because the architectures tend to be quite complimentary. Large cloud providers also see value in funding them because security services are quite capitally and operationally expensive – they require huge investments in code, infrastructure, monitoring and support staff – which means it’s challenging for these large IaaS providers to offer these services themselves. According to MarketsandMarkets the cloud security market is forecast to grow nearly 16 per cent CAGR from $4.2bn in 2014 to $8.7bn in 2019.