SoftLayer founder Lance Crosby has emerged with his latest startup: StackPath, a cybersecurity company that landed a $150 million Series A round from private equity firm ABRY Partners.
The raise, according to Reuters, represents one of the largest financing rounds for a private cybersecurity firm. It also is more than all Dallas-Fort Worth companies combined have raised in any quarter over the past two years, according to the latest MoneyTree report.
Crosby has been in stealth mode since 2015 when he left SoftLayer, which was acquired by IBM in 2013 for $2 billion. His new Dallas-based company, which already has more than 30,000 customers, plans to use the funding round to drive acquisition strategy, further develop the overall infrastructure, and add new services.
“The Internet … may be the single most important utility supporting businesses today, yet we continue to overtax the aging infrastructure and struggle to make it secure,” Crosby said in a release. “It’s time to give businesses Internet services that have security built in, not bolted on — so they can be reliable guardians of their most precious assets.”
StackPath offers a suite of Web security services that gathers information and “learns” from each logged event. The services enable the software to become more threat-aware and to identify and communicate real-time threats. The data is stored and available to StackPath subscribers and is also available via an API for developers, microservices, and connected devices.
StackPath is led by Crosby; COO Andrew Higginbotham, previously senior vice president of cloud and technology at CenturyLink; and CFO Kim Sheehy, former CFO at Dallas-based CyrusOne, who helped take CyrusOne public.
StackPath developed its own proprietary software, but also sought out technology that would bolster its offerings. It recently acquired Los Angeles-based MaxCDN, a NextGen CDN company; Fireblade, an Israel-based company with patented cloud based WAF technology; and Seattle-based Cloak, a leading VPN technology company.
