Lookout, which started in the consumer space but added an enterprise business in 2015 and has steadily added features over the years, will fully integrate the Saferpass technology within its product.
Firas Azmeh, General Manager, Personal Digital Safety & Carrier Partnerships at Lookout
Today, Lookout, a San Francisco-based provider of endpoint and cloud security solutions, is announcing that it is moving into the password management space for the first time with the acquisition of Slovakian-based SaferPass, which provides secure online identity solutions for both consumers and businesses. Lookout will integrate SaferPass’s technology into its own growing feature set. Financial terms of this transaction have not been disclosed.
Lookout started out as a purely consumer play, and after building up a large presence there, in 2015 they took funding to establish an enterprise business as well as the consumer one.
“We now define ourselves as providing cybersecurity security solutions for both consumer and business, although it manifests itself differently in the business space,” said Firas Azmeh, General Manager, Personal Digital Safety & Carrier Partnerships at Lookout. “We leverage our consumer data-driven platform to offer business as well around mobile threat defense [MTD]. Then, a year and a half ago we expanded that into cloud security.” They have three types of channel partners: technology partners; carrier partners, and resale channel partners.
Azmeh said that Lookout competes with the NetSkopes and Zscalers of the world.
“We see ourselves as one of the top three players in the SSE [Security Service Edge] space,” he stated.
In 2022, Lookout was named a Visionary in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge.
“What they saw was probably the most compete set of solutions that address our use cases,” Azmeh noted. “We ranked extremely high on all – second following only SkyHigh and ahead of NetSkope and Zscaler. That got us our rank on the X axis. The ranking on the Y axis reflects the fact that we are newer in the market although we have proven ourselves in the MTD space.”
Lookout did not previously have any kind of in-house password management capability before this.
“This is a new capability that we just acquired for the first time,” Azmeh said. “It reflects the fact that we have slowly been building out our feature set over time. We also added darkweb monitoring and breach protection, and full identity protection. With the addition of password management, our vision is not just adding a vault, but integrating it fully into our feature set. It’s not simply adding a password manager. It’s integrating it with all the other features of the product.”
The deal come about in part because Azmeh knew SaferPass’s founder and CEO Doug Crowley, who was formerly head of business development at AVG.
“I’ve known him for about five years and we had kept in touch,” he said. “We started out looking at a partnership. But as we dug in deeper, we saw that SaferPass has a very robust product. So it was the technology first and foremost that led to the acquisition.”
Azmeh said that while the technology of password management companies tends to be similar, there are some pluses here.
“There are a lot of mature password management companies, but SaferPass is a smaller company that has been able to deliver a product on par with what these larger companies can do. It also has the advantage of being very easy to integrate.
The acquisition of SaferPass expands Lookout’s footprint in Central Europe through its new location in Bratislava, Slovakia. SaferPass will now operate under the Lookout brand and leadership and the SaferPass team will be fully integrated into the Lookout organization.
