Darktrace Cybersecurity Firm Now Worth $400M

Cybersecurity firm Darktrace has garnered $65 million in equity funding through a consortium of investors led by private equity giant KKR and Co.

Reuters reported that the newest funding round values the company at more than $400 million.

The newswire stated that the round also included Summit Partners, an existing investor, who was joined by new entrants TenEleven Ventures and SoftBank-affiliated SB ISAT Fund.

The firm, which uses advanced machine learning to help focus on data breaches in a company’s network, has said that revenues were up 600 percent year over year.

Startups like Darktrace are attempting to challenge established players, such as FireEye and Symantec. And as cyberattacks get more sophisticated, machine-learning solutions are becoming increasingly important.

Separately, CNBC reported that the firm is taking on the hackers that look to program machines to attack computers, which becomes an escalating war. The firm has unveiled Antigena, which has been billed by the firm as “machine fighting machine tech,” and CEO Nicole Eagan told the outlet: “We have some early customers using Antigena, and what we have seen as the first use case is slowing down the attack, allowing humans to catch up. One example of that would be ransomware. We could detect ransomware as soon as it hit the machine, slow it down and stop it getting to the backup servers.”

The money just raised, said the executive, will be used to boost presence in the United States and Asia, which are existing markets, and also Latin America. “We are going to continue to invest in R&D. The initial Darktrace product is fully developed with a lot of the focus on machine fighting machine and the new wave of artificial intelligence attacks, so we will continue to build out our machine fighting machine tech,” Eagan said during the interview with CNBC.