Industrial Cybersecurity Firm Dragos Raises $37 Million
16.11.2018 securityweek IT

Industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos on Wednesday announced that it has raised $37 million in a Series B funding round, which brings the total raised by the company to date to over $48 million.

The funding round was led by Canaan, with participation from Emerson, National Grid, and Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), along with some existing investors. Joydeep Bhattacharyya, partner at Canaan, joins Dragos’ board of directors.

The money will be used for growing the company’s team in all areas, international expansion, and accelerating the growth of its software platform, intelligence, and threat operations services.

“The Series B raising period only lasted a few weeks and over 84 venture firms reached out to talk to us,” said Robert Lee, CEO of Dragos. “The speed of the B round and the number of potential investors is a sign that the market is evolving and that people are becoming aware that copy/pasting your enterprise security strategy into the industrial networks simply won’t work. Industrial specific people, processes, and technology are needed for industrial security because our threats and challenges are different.”

Dragos provides a threat detection and response platform, threat hunting and incident response services, and weekly intelligence reports. The company has been involved in investigating the Triton/Trisis incident and presented some of its findings at SecurityWeek’s ICS Cyber Security Conference last month.

“In Dragos’ Series A in July of 2017 we raised $10M and we were constantly told by investors that the industrial security market is too small and too slow,” Lee said. “However, we were able to prove out a lot in the last year and a half since our A round thanks to our customers who were far more numerous than we could have projected and much more forward leaning than the markets folks thought they were.”

The industrial cybersecurity market has been growing and established players of the IT cybersecurity market are looking to expand their operations into this space. IoT security company ForeScout recently announced the acquisition of operational technology (OT) network security firm SecurityMatters for roughly $113 million in cash.