A year ago, I wrote about building cyber-resilience in a post-hacked world and our investment in a company called Balbix.
We continue to be in a world where it’s a matter of when, not if, an enterprise is hacked. I call this the ‘post-hacked world.’ Discussions with our CIO advisory group make it clear that building cyber-resilience is a top priority for the C-suite and boards. Being able to analyze the interplay of the enterprise attack surface and the threat landscape to accurately predict and prioritize areas of risk, and act on this information in a timely manner, is key to getting ahead of attackers! Balbix’s unique breach avoidance platform does exactly this — it can be used to systematically prevent security incidents before attacks happen, and thus avoid breaches.
We knew we were dealing with a paradigm shift of consequence the day we met Gaurav Banga, founder and CEO of Balbix, in 2015 and heard him share his vision for Balbix and plans for meeting the fundamental unmet needs of the cyber-security market. In the last 12 months since Balbix came out of stealth, we have seen rapidly increasing interest in managing breach risk and cyber-resilience and Balbix has executed well to take advantage of this opportunity. Balbix has recruited a great management team of experienced industry experts.
Balbix has been able to capture the imagination and evangelical support of customers, some of whom I have had a chance to interact with first hand. It is very clear that Balbix’s solutions have a significant positive impact in the lives of cybersecurity personnel while bringing unprecedented clarity and visibility to the C-suite. Part of the reason behind this is Balbix’s relentless focus on not just the technical capabilities of their platform but also on ease-of-use of the system to make it relevant to all stakeholders. As I was reminded by a Balbix customer recently, “what was the last security product whose dashboard your CEO could actually understand and appreciate?”.
Gartner and other analysts have started describing this emerging market, and recognizedBalbix’s unique and innovative approach. Balbix has also successfully recruited a number of large managed service providers, including TechMahindra to accelerate market adoption of their products.
Today, Balbix announced their Series B, an $20 million round led by Singtel Innov8, the corporate venture fund of the Singtel Group, joined by Cisco’s former CEO and Executive Chairman John Chambers’ JC2 Ventures, Mubadala Ventures, the venture arm of Abu Dhabi’s well respected $127 billion sovereign fund Mubadala Investment Company, and industry luminaries Pankaj Patel, Gary Gauba, and BV Jagadeesh. We are significant investors in this financing round and are excited about this milestone for Balbix.
