Cambridge, Ontario, Sept. 16, 2014 – eSentire, Inc., a leader in Active Threat Protection solutions and managed security services today announced that it had completed a $14M (CAD) Series C investment round led by Georgian Partners with participation from Cisco Investments and Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund along with existing investors Edison Partners and VentureLink.
Recognized as the leading security service provider to more than 450 financial services firms, legal, extractive and healthcare organizations, eSentire will use the equity investment to expand its technical capabilities and fuel its growth by expanding services into new sectors including critical infrastructure and IP based markets such as technology and bio-pharma.
“Georgian Partners invests in proven growth and eSentire has established itself as a true market leader displacing and out-pacing its larger counterparts,” said Georgian Partners Managing Partner Simon Chong.
eSentire pioneered Continuous Advanced Threat Protection, which leading analyst firm Gartner Research began covering in June of this year as a best practices framework for defending against the most egregious cyber security attacks. eSentire’s solution delivers continuous monitoring, real-time threat detection and containment technology as a service with human threat analysts on a 24x7x365 basis. eSentire challenges legacy security approaches, combining behavior-based analytics, immediate mitigation and advanced threat intelligence.
“Cisco is committed to fostering innovation in Canada that supports our vision of the opportunity the Internet of Everything represents. Cybercrime is a growing and continued threat to all facets of life around the world. We believe eSentire will continue to meet this challenge as the company grows its global footprint,” said Cisco Canada President Nitin Kawale.
“Stock trading and banking regulatory bodies, including the SEC and FINRA in the United States and the FCA in the United Kingdom, are fixated on cybersecurity threats and the inherent risk they pose to the global economy,” said eSentire CEO J.Paul Haynes. “We live in a world where the rate of advanced targeted attacks against all businesses increases every day of every week,” Haynes added and went on to say, “it is great that such prominent investors are backing eSentire’s innovation vision that will enable us to remain a few steps ahead of the bad guys. In our Cambridge, Ontario research facility we are developing some of the most advanced forensic and threat detection capabilities available to the commercial sector giving them capabilities normally reserved for three letter agencies.”
The company said it intends to immediately hire 40 new positions to its research facility to keep pace with demand.