Lastline, a malware fighter, secures $10 million funding round

Lastline, an advanced malware defense platform provider, has raised $10 million from new investors Dell Ventures and Presidio Ventures, as well as existing investors Redpoint Ventures and e.ventures.

With the new round of funding, Lastline will continue to focus on serving its rapidly growing, global enterprise customer base as well as new and existing partnerships to improve information security and threat intelligence worldwide.

“We are proud to join the Lastline team in bringing their unmatched mix of academic rigor, executive leadership and anti-malware innovation to market around the world.”

This round of funding adds to the $13.7 million raised in earlier rounds to bring total funding raised to nearly $24 million since the company’s founding in 2011.

“Today’s strategic investment in Lastline expands our commitment to bring innovation and breakthrough technology to our customers,” said Victor Chang, director of Dell Ventures. “Combining Dell IP with Lastline technology positions us to deliver differentiating solutions to help protect our customers from the ever-changing, advanced security threats to their business.”

Dell Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Dell, announced its $300 million Strategic Innovation Venture Fund last December. In addition to providing capital, Dell Ventures can offer access to a breadth of Dell resources, including technical and business expertise, brand, OEM solutions, channels and go-to-market relationships.

“Advanced malware is impacting businesses in every region and industry,” said Shaun Tanabe, director of Presidio Ventures. “We are proud to join the Lastline team in bringing their unmatched mix of academic rigor, executive leadership and anti-malware innovation to market around the world.”

Funding from Presidio Ventures, the wholly-owned, U.S.-based investment vehicle of Sumitomo Corporation, underscores Lastline’s expanding reach into Japan as well as into broader enterprise markets in the Asia-Pacific region including banking, infrastructure, media and manufacturing.

“Lastline has the most compelling advanced malware defense platform on the market. Its software- and cloud-centric approach provides enterprises an average of ten times the value of first-generation APT appliance vendors,” said John Walecka, partner of Redpoint Ventures. “Lastline can detect evasive malware that is crafted to bypass detection of open source and first-generation sandboxing technology.”

In June 2013, Redpoint Ventures and e.ventures led the $10 million Series B round, commercially catapulting the company with deep academic roots into the multi-billion-dollar global IT security marketplace.

In the past year, Lastline has deployed its next-generation sandbox powered by full system emulation technology and cloud-based threat analysis in enterprises and with managed security service providers (MSSPs) across North America, Europe and Asia — rooting out zero-day threats, advanced persistent threats (APTs), advanced targeted attacks (ATAs) and advanced malware not caught by traditional anti-virus or first-generation sandboxing technologies.

“Our software platform and cloud-centric approach to combating advanced malware is seeing a strong response in the market from global enterprises and our security partners who are dissatisfied with the costly and incomplete offerings of first-generation APT vendors,” said Jens Andreassen, CEO of Lastline. “We are delighted to have new and existing investors backing our vision to help us defend even the largest organizations and the billions of people they serve worldwide from this new wave of pernicious threats.”

The Lastline advanced malware defense platform provides Global 2000 enterprises universal protection against threats entering networks via Web, file and email. Lastline inspects network traffic, attachments and URLs for advanced malware in an elastic, cloud-centric, sandbox analysis environment, without relying on traditional signature-based approaches.