After a major cash injection from investors, this NC startup aims to double jobs
A Triangle cybersecurity startup plans to double its workforce in the coming months, after raising a massive haul of money from investors.
Morrisville-based JupiterOne said Wednesday it had landed $19 million from investors, including from one of the largest players in the investment world, Bain Capital.
This is the first time that JupiterOne has taken on outside money. Usually, early rounds of funding from investors — referred to as Series A rounds — bring in much less than $20 million.
While the company is still young, Erkang Zheng, JupiterOne’s CEO and founder, said that it was able to fetch a large funding round because it is maturing quickly.
“We have quite a bit more customers than a typical Series A company,” Zheng said in an interview over Zoom. Its customers include large tech companies like social media site Reddit, analytics firm Databricks and the identity management company Auth0.
That’s in part because the company was borne from another successful Triangle venture.
Health care data firm LifeOmic spun out JupiterOne in 2018. Zheng was LifeOmic’s chief information security officer and founded JupiterOne to solve some of the problems he was facing with cloud data security.
The problem: tracking the multitude of assets companies have across cloud platforms. JupiterOne’s platform helps companies monitor all of their exposure points across cloud and digital platforms and helps them determine where their weak spots may be. Many companies struggle to just keep track of everything they have connected to the web.
“You cannot protect what you can’t see,” Zheng said. “But it is far more complicated ... when we get into today’s cloud native operations.”
Enrique Salem, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures and former CEO of cybersecurity firm Symantec, said JupiterOne has the chance to tap into a huge market.
“JupiterOne has developed a compelling product that integrates quickly, has applicability across enterprise segments, and is highly reviewed by current customers,” Salem, who is joining the company’s board, said in a statement. “We see a large multibillion-dollar market opportunity for this technology. ... Asset management is the first step in building a successful security program, and it’s currently a tedious, imperfect process that’s well-suited for automation.”
While the company is not yet profitable, Zheng said this money will help it reach that goal. Its services have proven to be very sticky, with several customers renewing their one-year subscriptions last month.
The current goal is to grow revenue by seven to 10 times its current level in the next two years. That will require the firm to sign up many more customers and grow its team. It recently instituted a free/tiered version of its service that it thinks will attract many more customers, who eventually will become paying subscribers.
“Rather than turning a profit at this moment, we’re focused very much on maturing the product, acquiring customers and getting people to use it,” Zheng said. “We have a healthy profit margin ... which continues to trend in a very positive direction. So, you know, absolutely we will become a very profitable business once the investment is done.”
The startup currently has around 20 employees, 15 of whom are based at the Morrisville office. With the new funding, Zheng said, the company will likely hire 20 more employees by the end of next year. While the company will consider some remote work, it wants the majority of hires to be based in the Triangle.
Zheng is a veteran of the Triangle’s tech scene. He’s been living and working in the area since he graduated from N.C. State University 20 years ago. Before LifeOmic he served in cybersecurity roles at IBM and Fidelity.
The region’s startup ecosystem has changed significantly since he first moved here, he noted. While his current startup may have just raised a large amount of money, he said, that same task was much harder in the early 2000s.
“I actually was part of a startup in the early 2000s in [Research Triangle Park]. That was painful, I’ll be honest,” he said. right “It was difficult to get funding, (and) not many people were interested in working at a startup in the RTP area at the time.
“But that that was 18 years ago; now is quite different.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
