vArmour raises another $44 million in a Series E funding round to address what they see as a massive opportunity, and are investing most of it in sales and marketing resources as a result, including hiring a resident person in Canada for the first time.
Tim Eades, CEO of vArmour
Cloud security vendor vArmour has announced it has raised $44M in Series E funding, bringing their total funding to date to $127 million. The new round was led by Bob Ackerman’s AllegisCyber and Dave DeWalt’s NightDragon, and included participation from existing investors. vArmour sees their potential addressable market expanding massively, and will invest the lion’s share of the new money in hiring sales and marketing people to take advantage of it. This will include hiring a Canadian-based resource to oversee their customers and partners here.
“vArmour is an API-driven cloud security company,” said Tim Eades, CEO of vArmour. “The technology that we are bring to market – Conform – allows an organization to really move seamlessly across clouds and maintain continuous compliance. We have focused on our ability to leverage native controls, to drive continuous compliance on one hand and reduce attack surface on the other. You need consistent controls that are easy to use and leverage native controls, if they exist to drive compliance.”
Eades said that the market opportunity only continues to strengthen, with the worldwide public cloud services market projected to grow 17.3 per cent in 2019.
“It’s a product-led sales cycle, and with everyone going to some sort of cloud, the market is absolutely massive,” he said. “It’s especially broad for us, because we don’t care if the environment is virtual or containers. As a result, over the last couple of years, we have created a very self-service business model, where the customer doesn’t have to talk to a sales rep. This business is still supplied through the channel, but market education has to be product-led and self-service, because of the way that customers increasingly are making buying decisions today.
“Our primary target is the enterprise, and especially those with regulated assets,” Eades added. “But with a self-service model, anyone can come in over the web. One of our customers is a church! The sweet spot for the channel is regulated assets in public and private clouds, to drive consistent compliance regardless of the estate – and we can make that easy.”
vArmour has between 120 to 130 channel partners globally.
“We have two major partner types,” Eades said. “One is companies that were born in virtualization and understand that private cloud assets will move towards a public cloud. The other is boutique VARs that have a really great understanding of CIOs and CISOs, and a very strategic appreciation of the direction of a particular company. They have those strategic relationships and understand economic relationships as well as security. Those ones do incredibly well for us.”
The funding from this round is overwhelmingly being put into sales and marketing expansion.
“It’s all about sales and distribution,” Eades said. “We recently won an award for our product, and we continue to build it and make it stronger, but this money is about sales and marketing. I probably interview two people a day for those roles, and have for 2-3 months. About 80 per cent of these funds will be spent on demand generation and hiring new salespeople.”
That will include a resident person in Canada. vArmour has Canadian customers and partners, and appears at events in Canada, but it has not been locally managed.
“We are in the process of hiring someone now in Canada,” Eades said. “We have great customers there. Right now, it’s being serviced out of the U.S.”
Going forward, Eades said the plan is simply to double down on the company’s core strengths.
“We have simplicity and scale as assets,” he said. “Most can’t do both. We focus on these pillars all the time. The road map is focused on continuing to do that, to make it really simple to address the whole gigantic market. We measure compliance and score it, and are improving and working on those scores so the customer is really attuned to whether they are compliant and their attack surface is being reduced. That’s our other priority. Value illustration is nothing if its not measured.”
