Israeli cyber company Illusive Networks completes $24 million series B

Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company Illusive Networks Ltd. announced on Wednesday that it has completed a $24 million series B financing round. The round was led by Spring Lake Equity Partners, with participation from Marker, New Enterprise Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors, Cisco, Microsoft, and Citi.

Illusive is a Team8 portfolio company that was founded in 2014 by Ofer Israeli and has so far raised a total of $58 million. The company employs 100 people, 60 of them in Israel and the rest in the U.S., and is in the process of recruiting 30 more.

Illusive’s security solutions focus on shrinking the attack surface and stopping attacker movement. It creates a hostile environment for attackers, depriving them of the means to progress towards critical assets after breaching the perimeter. Hackers are increasingly finding more vulnerabilities within an enterprise's security stack, allowing them to move laterally within the network and conduct reconnaissance and exfiltration. Illusive identifies and removes the vulnerable connections and credentials that enable attackers to move undetected, and then replaces them with deceptive versions that fool attackers into revealing their presence upon engagement. Unlike behavioral or anomaly-based threat detection, Illusive’s agentless approach captures deterministic proof of in-progress attacks and provides actionable forensics to empower a quick and effective response. Last week, the company announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft, which will include Illusive’s solutions as a “Co-sell” partner and offer it as part of its Azure cloud computing service. The company also reported a 228% growth in new annual recurring revenues over the last 12 months.

“Our rapid growth is a testament to the need for our solution, especially with the rise of cyber-attacks and the complexity of securing remote workers which makes our products more critical at this time,” said Ofer Israeli, Illusive Networks’ CEO and founder.

“Cyber-attackers are savvier than ever in evading security monitoring and controls. The next level of cybersecurity needs to be deterministic, not reactionary. Illusive will also further invest in cloud security and make product enhancements that are critical as enterprises are increasing their deployment of workloads in the cloud. That’s why Illusive will continue to grow and why it’s a company worth investing in,” said Jeff Williams, a founding partner of Spring Lake Equity Partners.