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Acquisitions Critical to FireEye Growth Strategy, Verodin is Latest

Cybersecurity continues to be the hot specialization within the software sector, with rapidly advancing threats to businesses across industries and geographies, the demand for more security is insatiable. FireEye, a publicly traded cybersecurity leader, is scaling through acquisition to capture more market share across the variety of demands called on by businesses. Recently, it announced it would acquire Verodin for $250 million.

Verodin was founded just a handful of years ago in 2014 in McLean, Virginia. To date, it has raised over $30 million from astute investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Blackstone, Capital One Growth Ventures, Cisco Ventures, ClearSky, Crosslink Capital, Rally Ventures and TenEleven Ventures. Verodin is a business platform that provides organizations with the evidence needed to measure, manage and improve cybersecurity effectiveness.

At the helm is Chris Key, who co-founded the company to pioneer the instrumentation of cybersecurity. He brought to Verodin over 20 years of strategic and technical experience across cybersecurity, network engineering and software design. Previously, he was Chief Architect of Network Products at ArcSight (HP), a global leader in cybersecurity software solutions, where he continued to develop the incident response and network automation product line that was acquired from ENIRA Technologies, a company he founded in 2003.

Chris sees the benefits of the combination, “By joining FireEye, Verodin extends its ability to help customers take a proactive approach to understanding and mitigating the unique risks, inefficiencies and vulnerabilities in their environments.”

FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia meanwhile states, “Verodin gives us the ability to automate security effectiveness testing using the sophisticated attacks we spend hundreds of thousands of hours responding to, and provides a systematic, quantifiable, and continuous approach to security program validation.”

FireEye is an intelligence-led security company that provides hardware, software, and services to investigate cybersecurity attacks, protect against malicious software, and analyze IT security risks. It was founded in 2004 and went public in 2013. Its last major acquisition was in 2016, when it acquired iSIGHT Partners for $200 million. iSIGHT was a threat intelligence company that gathered information about hacker groups and other cybersecurity risks.

In between these two major acquisitions, FireEye has been scooping up smaller companies such as Invotas in February of 2015 and X15 Software and The Email Laundry in 2018. It kicked off its acquisition spree with a splash, shortly after it went public, by purchasing Mandiant for $1 billion in January of 2014.