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October 10, 2018

Our Investment in Demisto

Modern Security is Operations

Breach after breach, we hear about organizations failing in their defense against the bad guys. If you hunt down the cause — in the vast majority of those cases, the attacker didn’t compromise the company by designing an exotic new piece of malware. The root of the attack usually exploits human error by defender organizations, finding the one misstep out of the thousands of actions and successful containments by overworked security teams.

Security people know this. CISOs are focused on people issues — hiring, retention and upskilling — and operational issues — efficiency, quality and visibility. Their resource-constrained security teams are forced to manage a large and growing set of security products across heterogeneous and fast-evolving environments. Security teams need a strategy and tools to improve the way they operate, just to keep up.

Today, Demisto — the leading security operations platform — announced their partnership with Greylock as well as the general availability of their 4.0 offering, which extends their product leadership and expands their scope of use cases. I am excited to lead Demisto’s $43M Series C financing and to join Accel and ClearSky on the board.

Demisto is a very different kind of security company, with a very big idea. The founders — Slavik Markovich, Rishi Bhargava, Dan Sarel and Guy Rinat, are proven technical innovators and industry veterans from Check Point, McAfee, and prior startups. They didn’t want to build yet another point solution — they realized what security really needs is a way to be consistently successful despite all the complexity.

In partnership with their customers and community, they took a clean-sheet approach. What they came up with in response to this challenge was an entirely new category of product, which combines three key pillars: a rich integration platform, a powerful yet usable workflow and automation engine, and a collaborative workbench — a cousin of Slack and a super-powered command line. Security people love to use Demisto every day to get their work done. Unlike other existing and new security products that need to be managed, Demisto reduces burden, while making security organizations faster, measurably more effective, and more confident.

The company is off to a fast start, with strong demand from channel partners and customers. They have the largest community of security users in the industry, and a growing base of advocates — from the individual users of their free Community Edition to an increasing number of Fortune 500 customers. Just a few years after the company’s founding, customers and industry analysts are recognizing the importance of this new category “Security Automation, Orchestration and Response,” as well as Demisto’s leadership.

I had tracked the company’s differentiated story and outsize market presence momentum since their launch. Over a series of long meetings at Demisto’s offices in Cupertino (and then dinners at the security industry event Black Hat), I was struck by the team’s customer orientation, depth of industry knowledge, commitment to constant innovation, and long-term ambition to build a durable company and have an impact on the industry.

Greylock is no stranger to the security markets, having invested in several category-defining companies in security, including Imperva, Okta, OpenDNS, Palo Alto Networks and Skyhigh. Demisto also joins a distinguished list of other enterprise companies at Greylock including AppDynamics, Cloudera, Docker, Pure Storage, Red Hat, Rubrik, ServiceNow, SuccessFactors and Workday. We look forward to partnering with Slavik, the entire Demisto team, Accel and ClearSky to help continue to define a new product category, and build a franchise company in security. Modern security is operations, and Demisto is an operational hub for every modern security team.

Read more from Slavik here.