Cybereason, a cybersecurity firm, is to receive a $100m investment from SoftBank Corp. with Eric Gan, a longtime executive at SoftBank, taking over as CEO to replace co-founder Lior Div. Div will continue as an adviser.
Cybereason has long been backed by SoftBank, which led the company’s Series C, D and E funding rounds in 2015, 2017 and 2019, respectively, raising a total of $359m. With the latest investment, Cybereason has raised $850m in nine rounds.
The investment values the firm at about $3bn and will make SoftBank its largest shareholder.
Cybereason has been undergoing restructuring, with the firm laying off 17% of its staff earlier this year, and approximately 10% of its workforce in June. Its headcount has fallen by 38% since April 2022, and the firm’s sales force has shrunk by 56%.
However, despite the company’s relatively small market footprint, industry analysts think highly of Cybereason’s endpoint security capabilities. Cybereason leapfrogged from the visionaries to the leaders quadrant in last month’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection thanks to dramatic improvements in execution ability, where the company jumped from 12th place last year to fourth this year.
Cybereason has 35% market share in Japan and generates half of its revenue outside the US. Gan, who founded Japanese mobile telecommunications company eAccess, will support Cybereason’s next stage of global growth and scale.
Cybereason had filed for a US initial public offering in January 2022, but later abandoned the plans and instead hired JPMorgan Chase to find a buyer for the company, putting the firm’s valuation at $2.5bn.
However, in October 2022, Div said Cybereason is “not looking to sell the business” and that the layoffs will position the company “as a financially resilient, stand-alone market leader.”
