Triangle cybersecurity startup raises $70M in funding, plans local expansion
A cybersecurity startup based in Morrisville announced Thursday it had closed a $70 million funding round and achieved an estimated total valuation in excess of $1 billion.
JupiterOne has charted meteoric growth since its inception in 2018. Its founder and CEO, Erkang Zheng, started the company after working as chief information security officer at LifeOmic, a health care data firm with offices in Morrisville. In his role at LifeOmic, Zheng identified a frustrating problem: Tracking the many assets companies had across cloud platforms was a tedious and disjointed process.
“Organizations are becoming more complex,” Zheng said in an interview. “Organizations themselves are becoming more digital, because of digital transformation, remote work — every company is to some extent becoming a technology company. ...There are just so many things that are trying to be put together and the security teams are becoming so overwhelmed.”
Its latest round of funding earned JupiterOne a coveted seat among an exclusive group of Triangle startups — those with valuations that break the billion-dollar threshold. Other such companies include Pendo, Insightsoftware and Cary’s Epic Games. The latter’s $29 billion valuation makes it one of the most valuable startups in the country.
JupiterOne’s platform — called a cyber asset attack surface management, or CAASM, platform — simplifies the security process for client companies and aggregates data to help users identify weak points across their systems.
“Without a platform like JupiterOne’s that combines visibility into one place, you cannot see the whole picture. You’re just seeing parts of it,” Zheng said. “Having, say, 50 subsets of the picture is almost impossible for the human brain to make sense of it and connect the dots across that complex ecosystem. So JupiterOne provides that platform in a single place to combine them. That’s, in fact, what the One in the name JupiterOne denotes — just one place for you to have complete visibility.”
Prominent companies from around the world employ JupiterOne’s product to improve their cybersecurity. Big names include Cisco, Indeed, Robinhood and Databricks.
To expand the company’s capacity for new clients, Zheng hopes to hire another 50 employees in 2022. JupiterOne added 100 workers in the past year after its Series B funding round, bringing its current count to 150. Some employees work remotely, but most of JupiterOne’s staff is based in the Triangle where the company’s headquarters will remain, Zheng said, since “we can’t let the folks in Silicon Valley have all the fun.”
“Being a Raleigh area, local company — we’re extremely proud of being here and supporting the community,” said Zheng, who graduated from N.C. State about 20 years ago and has spent his entire career at Triangle companies. “We have partnerships with N.C. State and hopefully will add additional local community (colleges) and universities as well.”
Its Series C funds will help JupiterOne expand product development to address market needs across attack surface management, including unified asset inventory, vulnerability management, and security posture automation, the company said.
“It was just less than two years ago, actually, when we had our first round of fundraising, and we were tiny — we were nothing and our valuation was nothing,” Zheng said. “I’m extremely proud of our entire team for accomplishing this in less than two years, and I’m excited for what comes next.”
