Lior Div, Cybereason
Kiyoshi Ota | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Cybereason, a security software vendor backed by SoftBank and Alphabet‘s Google cloud unit, has confidentially filed for a stock market listing in the U.S. at a reported $5 billion valuation, according to Reuters.
The company ranked No. 32 on last year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list.
Co-founder and CEO Lior Div started Cybereason in Israel in 2012, before moving the company to Boston two years later. It’s become one of the fastest-growing players in the burgeoning market of endpoint protection, which involves securing large corporate and government networks and their many devices from the advanced hacking tools and techniques that are proliferating across the globe.
The company’s technology has uncovered schemes in recent years, including one in which the perpetrator made off with large amounts of personal and corporate data from over a dozen global telecommunications companies. Cybereason found links between the attack and previous Chinese cyber espionage campaigns.
In early May, Cybereason CEO Lior Div took his first trip back to Israel since before the pandemic to visit his 300 employees based there. A few days into his stay came the news that Colonial Pipeline, the operator of the largest U.S. pipeline, had been paralyzed by a cyberattack that knocked out a 5,500-mile fuel network. The Colonial Pipeline attack was of particular concern because the group responsible, an outfit called DarkSide, had tried to infiltrate one of Cybereason’s clients nine months earlier.
In tracing DarkSide’s roots, Cybereason researchers were so jarred by what they had learned that the company published a blog post at the beginning of April laying out some of its findings. It described DarkSide as a team of extortionists who steal private data and threaten to make it public unless the victim pays a large sum of money — typically $200,000 to $2 million.
Cybereason has raised nearly $750 million to date and was most recently valued at $2.7 billion, according to PitchBook data. Next to SoftBank and Google, Liberty Strategic Capital, the investment firm of former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, is among the company’s more notable investors.
A Cybereason spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
—CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
CNBC is now accepting nominations for the 2022 Disruptor 50 list, our annual look at private innovators using breakthrough technology to transform industries and become the next generation of great public companies. Submit your nomination by Friday, Feb. 4, at 3 pm Eastern time.
