The funding round was led by K1 Investment Management, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners and Insight Partners. Additional investors include Awz Ventures, a Canadian-Israeli VC group, and Blackstone.
The funding is said to make Pentera the highest-valued company in its category. With more than 400 enterprise customers, the recent funding allows Pentera to scale operations across all functions and regions, and grow its headcount from 150 to 300 employees by the end of 2022, as it journeys towards IPO.
Pentera will use the new funding to grow its global operations and product line, with the mission to empower every enterprise in every vertical to confidently reduce cyber risk and become attack-ready.
“Pentera’s exponential growth has proven that enterprises are no longer willing to compromise for assumptions and simulations, but rather demand real-world validation of their security resilience against the latest cyber attacks,” said Amitai Ratzon, the company’s CEO. “Pentera is excited for the partnership with K1 as they share our vision to achieve category leadership in security validation. We are especially grateful to our employees, customers, partners, and investors for sharing our passion for the revolution we bring to the cybersecurity world.”
Founded by Arik Liberzon, Arik Faingold, and a group of former cyber-security researchers at the Israel Defense Forces, Pentera allows security workers to test its network vulnerability from the hacker’s perspective.
By imitating hackers’ attack in a safe environment, Pentera offers security teams an assessment of their resiliency against real attacks.
Its automated penetration testing technology has been used by over 400 enterprise customers globally, including Blackstone Inc, according to the company.
Global ransomware attacks increased by 151% year-on-year in the first half of 2021 and hackers are set to become more aggressive, according to a report issued by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security last month.
