illusive networks has announced a $22 million Series B round of funding, led by new investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA). The round included participation from new and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Marker LLC, Citi Ventures and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Kittu Kolluri, general partner at NEA, will join illusive networks’ Board of Directors.
The funding will further fuel illusive’s global expansion investing in sales and marketing, as well as expanding the engineering and support teams for the company’s patent pending security deception technologies. The company’s “detection by deception” approach uses agentless patent-pending technology that blankets a company’s entire network — every endpoint, server and network component — with information that deceives would-be attackers. When attackers act upon the false information, illusive networks neutralizes the attack and triggers a detailed breach report—enabling security administrators to detect, track and contain the attack in its early stages.
“Deceptions are achieved through use of deceitful responses, purposeful obfuscations, feints, misdirection and other falsehoods,” said Gartner security analyst Lawrence Pingree. “These techniques leverage the trust that attackers and the attackers’ tools must have in the network protocols, infrastructure, applications, systems and data elements they interact with or access during the execution of their attacks or through their intelligence gathering activities.”
Launched in June 2015, illusive networks raised a $5 million Series A round from leading cybersecurity foundry Team8. In just four months, it has doubled its number of employees, opened a New York City office to further fuel North American growth, and has made several executive leadership hires in sales and marketing.
The company is led by CEO Shlomo Touboul, and was founded by vice president of R&D, Ofer Israeli, a Check Point veteran, together with cybersecurity foundry Team8. Nadav Zafrir, CEO of Team8 and former head of the IDF’s Intelligence Unit 8200, serves as illusive network’s Chairman of the Board.
“Established security approaches, such as perimeter defense and old-school honeypots, are failing to protect networks,” said Kolluri. “illusive networks has a uniquely innovative vision, scalable architecture and some of the best security DNA out there. We are thrilled to partner with the team to take deception-based technology to the next level.”