FireEye Secures $14.5 Million in Series C Funding to Combat Growing Botnet Problem
Company to Leverage New Capital for Product Development, Sales and Marketing Initiatives
MILPITAS, Calif.—May 12, 2008 —FireEye, Inc., the leader in global anti-botnet protection, today announced $14.5 million in new venture capital funding from a suite of blue-chip investors led by DAG Ventures with Juniper Networks, JAFCO Ventures, SVB Capital, Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Sequoia Capital also participating. The new investment marks the company's third round of funding totaling $35.5 million. FireEye will leverage the new funding to further develop the company's botnet protection solution and key sales and marketing initiatives.
"We are dedicated to addressing the growing threats of botnet-related cybercrime affecting businesses and consumers daily," said Ashar Aziz, founder and CEO of FireEye. "This latest round of funding validates that we are at the forefront in delivering a world-class botnet protection solution and are successfully executing against our company vision."
Botnets are armies of infected and remotely controlled computers, or bots, which are employed by cyber criminals to exploit consumers and businesses for profit. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the annual loss due to computer crime is estimated at $67.2 billion for U.S. businesses. By coordinating hundreds of thousands of infected PCs into a highly efficient botnet, cyber criminals can execute a wide range of malicious attacks from denial-of-service (DoS) extortion and consumer identity theft to phishing schemes and government espionage. The increase in user-generated Web content and the popularity of Web 2.0 applications in the enterprise such as Web-based e-mail, social networking and SaaS CRM provide botnet hackers with new vectors for infiltration. Preventative measures such as FireEye's Botwall™ solution are essential in discovering and stopping botnet infections before they put resources, information and people at risk.
According to John J. Cadeddu, managing partner, DAG Ventures, "In today's economy, we are very selective in our investment decisions. FireEye is a true visionary in addressing fundamental security challenges that threaten to unravel the Internet economy. The company has been exemplary in fulfilling its vision and we are pleased to add them to our portfolio of savvy tech innovators."
FireEye was founded in 2004, by Ashar Aziz, a twenty-year veteran in the security industry. Prior to founding FireEye, Aziz founded Terraspring, a datacenter automation and virtualization company acquired by Sun Microsystems. Prior to that, he was a distinguished engineer at Sun for a dozen years. The company's officers include David Butler, vice president of business development; Bahman Mahbod, vice president of engineering; and Zane M. Taylor, vice president of operations. Recently the company expanded its security brain trust with the addition of two renowned security experts and technologists, Dr. Fengmin Gong as chief security content officer and Dr. Stuart Staniford as chief scientist. These newly appointed security experts bring more than 30 years of security expertise and have published numerous technical papers on security vulnerabilities.
"FireEye has all the ingredients for success including a solid leadership team, innovative technology and growing customer base," said Promod Haque, managing partner, NVP. "The company is well positioned to capture the market and become the category leader in the botnet security space."
ABOUT FIREEYE
FireEye, Inc. is the leader in anti-botnet protection, enabling organizations to protect critical intellectual property, computing resources, and network infrastructure against bot infiltration. Today's most damaging attacks originate from and through highly organized botnets, or networks of remotely controlled, compromised machines. FireEye delivers a complete solution that is designed from the ground up to detect and protect organizations from botnets through global and local intelligence and analysis. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, JAFCO, SVB Capital, DAG Ventures, and Juniper Networks. For more information, contact (408) 321-6300 or go to www.fireeye.com.About Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital provides venture capital funding to founders of startups who want to turn business ideas into companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs", Sequoia Capital's Partners have worked with innovators such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of nVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube and Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Wireless Networks. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.
Contact:
Gaurav Garg
SEQUOIA CAPITAL
garg@sequoiacap.com
