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Axonius, one of the bigger players in the world of enterprise asset management — understanding and monitoring the digital assets and infrastructure that make up an organization’s network — has raised $200 million more in funding to expand its business on the heels of the company’s growth. The company, now nearly five years on from launching, is on track for more than $100 million in ARR with about 500 large enterprises among its customers.
The investment is being co-led by Lightspeed and Accel, and it is coming in the form of an extension to Axonius’s existing Series E of $200 million led by Accel on its own — an investment that it raised almost two years ago to the day. As an extension round, the valuation is also remaining flat, at $2.6 billion. (Prior to that, the company raised a $100 million round in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation.)
Neither investor commented on why Axonius or they chose to run this extra equity funding as an extension rather than a new Series F, but it is not unusual at the moment to see even healthy startups raising at more conservative valuations, especially when the rounds are later, growth stage investments.
“I didn’t feel the need to increase the valuation from the last round,” CEO and founder Dean Sysman, answered when asked about the decision.
“I never optimise for valuation right when we when we approach a funding round, we optimise for the best thing for the company for the long term, and we see ourselves as a very, very long term strategy because of the size of our problem and addressable market,” he said.
Despite the business crunch playing out in IT budgets and technology in general, the addressable market that Sysman is referring to has only grown over the years.
One of the most important aspects of a strong cybersecurity strategy today is awareness of attack surface: understanding what assets and services and interactions exist in a network is key to being able to protect malicious actors from entering it.
That’s easier said than done in today’s enterprise world. The rise of cloud services, containerization, big data analytics, microservices, a plethora of connected devices and work locations — including some with no humans involved at all — plus a range of legacy operations operating alongside all of that are just a few of the developments that define how we work today. All of them together create a complicated, and typically non-static, “area” that represents the myriad ways that a malicious hacker might enter a network and do damage.
Axonius is one of a group of specialist firms building platforms to help manage this. In the case of Axonius, it provides what Sysman called “as close to real time as possible” snapshots of how the network looks at any given point. Close is the realistic and operative word here: Axonius covers everything on premises and in the cloud or elsewhere in the network, but some products and services just do not provide data on a real-time basis. “We’re really dependent on the data sources we get,” he said.
From there it provides tools to detect when that snapshot has changed, and then suggestions for what actions to take as a result. There are some companies that aim to provide this information for data management, or for regulatory compliance, or to better track software spend — Xensam, for example, focuses on software assets primarily rather than end points; Vertice on expense management — Axonius’s primary objective is cybersecurity.
Companies that have signed on so far include Schneider Electric, News Corp, and Anheuser-Busch InBev, and the plan for New York-based Axonius is to use the investment both to continue enhancing the platform but also to continue expanding to new markets.
Accel and Lightspeed declined to be interviewed for this story, but Lightspeed provided us with a single quote in answer to various questions we had.
“We’ve been a longstanding partner of Axonius, and we like to double down into our best performing companies. Axonius clearly fits the bill. Their growth path speaks for itself – being one of the fastest cyber companies on record to achieve $100M ARR, reaching 1,000 platform integrations, and having evolved over the years from a single product asset management company to a broader management platform that controls an enterprises entire digital footprint, be it assets, software, SaaS, and more,” said Arsham Memarzadeh, partner, Lightspeed. “They’re well on their way to becoming a household name for any cyber or IT buyer.”
