Exabeam Secures $200 Million at $2.4 Billion Valuation, Welcomes New CEO and President Michael DeCesare

Exabeam, the security analytics and automation company, today announced a $200 million Series F growth round at a valuation of $2.4 billion. The round is led by the Owl Rock division of Blue Owl Capital and supported by existing investors Acrew Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners. Exabeam also welcomes cybersecurity industry leader Michael DeCesare as CEO and president. The company’s co-founder and first CEO, Nir Polak, will continue on as an active member of the executive team and remain at the company. Additionally, Polak will assume the role of chairman of the board.

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“Exabeam is in the middle of a large IT and cybersecurity trend, where organizations must capture more data across a growing distributed IT infrastructure while ensuring the security and integrity of the platforms upon which their businesses operate”

DeCesare has more than 25 years of experience leading high-growth security companies. He was president of McAfee (NASDAQ: MCFE), and most recently, DeCesare was CEO and president of ForeScout Technologies (NASDAQ: FSCT), which went public in 2017 under his leadership.

In addition, Exabeam Chief Product Officer Adam Geller will now lead both the product and engineering organizations, ensuring even tighter integration and alignment as the company innovates and invests in creating the number one trusted cloud SecOps platform on the market. Geller was previously a senior vice president of cloud security at Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW) before joining Exabeam in 2020.

“Exabeam defined the user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA) security technology category and is a leader in the security information and event management (SIEM) market. Innovation is in our DNA. We are reimagining the threat detection, investigation and response (TDIR) problem with an open extended detection and response (XDR), offering automation and use case-specific content so security analysts can quickly defend against threats, which is a true game changer for security teams,” said DeCesare. “Nir has built an incredibly robust, diverse and inclusive culture at Exabeam, and I am committed to helping it flourish. I’m thrilled to join Nir, Adam and the whole leadership team to help drive the company through its next phase of growth.”

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“This funding round gives us the operating capital required to continue executing on our vision to deliver the number one trusted cloud SecOps platform on the market,” said Polak. “It gives us the opportunity to triple down on our R&D efforts and continue engineering the most advanced UEBA, XDR and SIEM cloud security products available today. Now with Mike at the helm and Adam’s leadership over product and engineering, we have assembled a seasoned executive team ready to scale and take our business to the next level.”

Exabeam’s outcome-based approach to security around external threats, compromised insiders and malicious insiders is perfectly suited to support organizations as they manage exponential amounts of data and return to the post-pandemic workplace in a variety of hybrid scenarios. The company recently launched its new Fusion product line with Fusion XDR and Fusion SIEM. With 70 percent of new business in 2020 delivered through Exabeam cloud-based analytics and automation, adding XDR puts a new name on what Exabeam already provides to customers.

Over the last 12 months, Exabeam has also made significant investments in the Exabeam Partner Program, which now includes more than 400 reseller, distributor, system integrator, MSSP, MDR and consulting partners globally. In addition, driven by its open XDR approach for security teams, the company now has over 500 technology integrations with leading IT and security companies including cloud network, data lake and endpoint vendors such as CrowdStrike, Okta and Snowflake.

“Exabeam is poised to be the next-gen leader in the cloud security analytics, XDR and SIEM markets. We led this round of funding to provide the company with the resources necessary to support its sustainable, long-term growth and value creation,” said Pravin Vazirani, managing director and co-head of tech investing, Blue Owl Capital. “In today’s operating environment, cybersecurity is increasingly recognized as a mission-critical function across industries, and we’re proud to partner with Michael, Nir and the Exabeam team as they seize the opportunity ahead of them, continue to innovate and enable their clients to stay at the forefront in terms of identifying and addressing threats across their technology platforms.”

According to Mordor Intelligence, the cloud security software market is valued at $29.5 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach a market value of $37.37 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 5.2 percent over the forecast period (2021-2026). Gartner predicts that the SIEM market, worldwide, is poised to grow from $4 billion to $6.3 billion during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of 11.86 percent during the forecast period.¹

Additional Investor Quotes

“Exabeam is in the middle of a large IT and cybersecurity trend, where organizations must capture more data across a growing distributed IT infrastructure while ensuring the security and integrity of the platforms upon which their businesses operate,” said Ravi Mhatre, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Exabeam board member. “To the credit of its leadership, Exabeam has been able to quickly pivot to digital, remote and hybrid IT work strategies, driving new sales while making existing customers even more successful. We look forward to the company’s continued growth.”

“Cloud adoption by large enterprises has been pulled forward, and Exabeam is in an elite group of companies that successfully weathered market uncertainties through 2020 as it accelerated its move to a cloud-first company,” said Theresia Gouw, founding partner, Acrew Capital, and Exabeam board member. “Exabeam is a leading security player in a high-demand, high-stakes market where business and IT executives must be able to see all of their data, no matter its location, to make smart security, infrastructure and business decisions. The proven leadership at Exabeam continues to execute exceedingly well, and last year, the company was the fastest private security management company to hit $100 million in ARR.”

“This funding and valuation mark a new chapter in Exabeam’s journey as it pushes full speed ahead on breaking out of the security management space and becoming a 100 percent fully ‘for-the-cloud’ SecOps innovator,” said Matthew Howard, general partner, Norwest Venture Partners. “We are confident the company will continue to deliver additional value to security operation centers (SOCs), helping them become even more efficient and effective at protecting their organizations.”

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