Mobile phone security co Skycure raises $8m

dollars  picture: Thinkstock
dollars picture: Thinkstock

The funds will be used to expand marketing efforts and invest in R&D, including hiring in the US and Israel.

Israeli mobile phone security company Skycure has closed an $8 million dollar Series A investment round led by Shasta Ventures. The financing round was also with participation from Skycure customer New York Life Insurance Company.

The funds will be used to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts and invest further in R&D, including hiring in the US and Israel. Former investors Pitango Venture Capital and several industry-leading private investors, including Peter McKay and Michael Weider, experts in application security, also extended their investment in the round. In addition, Pitango co-founder, Rami Kalish, and former CEO of Zenprise, Jayaram Bhat, will join Skycure's board of directors.

According to Gartner the three forces that will drive the growth of security in the next few years are: mobile security, big data, and advanced targeted attacks. Skycure, founded in May 2012 by CEO Adi Sharabani and CTO Yair Amit, sits at the center of all three, leveraging massive amounts of crowd data to protect against any type of global or targeted mobile attack. The rise of cyber theft, cyber espionage, cyber fraud and cyber warfare are driving the need for mobile threat defense, as mobile devices are rapidly becoming the easiest way for hackers to attack.

Skycure is already helping a number of large organizations secure tens of thousands of mobile devices to protect their employees and business data, including New York Life. Skycure has offices in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv.

New York Life chief information security officer Richard Moore said, “Having Skycure is like having a secret informant on hackers. Skycure actually predicts attacks and can help you prevent them. When you have more than 35,000 mobile devices to secure like we do, that’s crucial. Using Skycure gives us visibility into the threats around us and allows us to make decisions based on facts rather than hunches.”

A first in the enterprise mobile security market, Skycure’s solution can be tested and deployed without requiring access to internal systems.

Sharabani said, “It was important that we build a mobile security product that is simple to deploy, easy to use, and ultra secure and it is resulting in unprecedented growth in demand for our products. We have reduced the installation time and time-to-value to literally hours, while preventing the bad guys from accessing and compromising mobile devices, applications and corporate data. It was this rapid time-to-value that convinced New York Life, one of the largest life insurers in the world, to join this round.”

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on March 24, 2015

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2015

dollars  picture: Thinkstock
dollars picture: Thinkstock
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