Israeli start-up Cyber-Ark Software, today announced the closing of a $12 million second round of financing.
The round was led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) followed by Vertex Management Israel and the company’s existing shareholders SCP, a SoftBank affiliate, JP Morgan/Chase Partners, IDB and Cabaret-ArbaOne. In the previous funding round, Cyber Ark raised $8 million at a $32 million company value, before money.
Cyber-Ark, an information security company, intends to use the funding to increase its sales and marketing efforts in Europe and the United States for its flagship product, the PrivateArk Inter-Business Vault.
The PrivateArk Inter-Business Vault allows organizations to share information with partners, customers and remote offices through a secured data vault. It is a new platform for inter-business information sharing that combines 10 layers of security, including firewall, virtual private network, access control, and others in an architecture that is fast and cost effective, Cyber-Ark says.
Cyber-Ark said a benchmark test of the Inter-Business Vault showed that on a slow Internet connection, a typical document could be accessed via the Vault 28 times faster than via a standard file server protected by a simple extranet made of a VPN and a data encryption product. The PrivateArk solution was named the “Best Security Product of the Year” at the 2001 Networking Industry Awards, the company added.
JVP founder and managing partner Erel Margalit said, “Cyber-Ark immediately attracted our attention because they managed to penetrate an impressive list of enterprises in a very short time in spite of current market conditions. After reviewing scores of data security business plans, we believe that Cyber-Ark has the disruptive technology to create a new category of enterprise security in a way that hasn’t happened since the emergence of companies such as Check Point or MEMCO.”
Cyber-Ark COO and co-founder Udi Mokady said, “Today, enterprises are integrating 5-7 different security products in an attempt to create a secured extranet, and then are adding different performance enhancers for data compression, encryption offloading and remote data caching. In contrast, Cyber-Ark has developed a complete inter-business infrastructure; including specific security protocols that are understood by the various security layers, and are built on an optimized infrastructure for remote networks, thus adding 'intelligence' that dramatically increases security and performance while reducing costs.”
Cyber-Ark is headquartered in Dedham, Massachusetts and its research and development center is located in Lod, Israel.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on 25 March, 2002