Cybersecurity startup Hunters today announced that it has raised a $68 million Series C round led by Stripes. New investors DTCP, Cisco Investments and Databricks also invested in this round, together with existing investors YL Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Microsoft’s venture fund M12, U.S. Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital and Snowflake Ventures. This new round brings Hunters’ total funding to date to $118 million, including last August’s $30 million Series B.
As Hunters co-founder and CEO Uri May told me, since its Series B round, the team doubled down on helping enterprises replace traditional Security and Information Event Management (SIEM) solutions with its own tools.
“We found the courage to go after complicated projects, like SIEM replacements,” he told me. “Since our [Series B], our confidence in that grew significantly and obviously, the results followed — because when you’re going after something with confidence, usually, if it’s the right thing, it’s working out.” And things are working out for Hunters, which according to May saw its revenue grow 5x in 2021.
It’s this wave of replacements that is currently washing through the enterprise that is also providing Hunters with an opportunity, May believes.
“We’re in this wave of awakening where a lot of security operations centers and enterprises around the world understand that they’re not really equipped to cope with the sophistication of the threat, the shortage of the talent, the magnitude and scale of the data, the amount of security product that they have — and they recognize all of those challenges and see the current solutions — usually technologies from vendors that have been around for the last 10 or 15 years — they understand that there’s a big gap from where they want to be and where they are today,” he said.
Since all of this creates quite a bit of urgency in the market, it’s no surprise that investors want to back companies like Hunters and that Hunters needs this funding to aggressively pursue this opportunity before this window closes. That’s also likely why we’re seeing so many strategic investors in Hunters, with Databricks and Cisco Ventures in this round and Snowflake Ventures in the previous one. As May noted, the plan here, especially with Databricks, is to build a sales motion similar to its partnership with Snowflake.
“For over three years, Hunter’s cloud-native architecture and automation have enabled security teams to adopt the security data lake model,” said Stefan Williams, head of Corporate Development at Snowflake. “Hunters, a Powered By Snowflake partner, is a great example of how investing in best-in-class solutions built using Snowflake extends our ability to mobilize data and contributes to the powerful network effects of Snowflake’s Data Cloud.”
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