Armis Launches from Stealth to Eliminate IoT Security Blind Spot for Enterprises

Sequoia Israel and Tenaya Capital invest $17M to help enterprises gain visibility and control over threats created by the explosion of connected devices

Palo Alto, CA – June 6, 2017

Armis, the enterprise IoT security company, launched from stealth today with $17 million in funding from Sequoia Israel and Tenaya Capital. Armis is the only technology platform that lets enterprises see and control compromised and unmanaged devices and rogue networks accessing their systems, effectively eliminating the IoT security blind spot that exists in all businesses today. Armis has also been named a Cool Vendor in the May 31, 2017, report titled, “Cool New Vendors in Security for Midsize Enterprises” from Gartner, Inc. Armis will demonstrate its product publicly for the first time at Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit on June 12-15.

According to Gartner there are 8.4 billion connected things in use worldwide this year, which will number 20.4 billion by 2020. This fast growing, dynamic ecosystem of everything from smartphones to webcams and keyboards presents a complex security challenge. In early deployments Armis has shown that businesses are unaware of 40 percent of the devices in their environment. They have limited visibility into which devices are accessing their networks, which exposes them to botnet attacks, network breaches, ransomware, and data loss.

Armis provides an agentless IoT security platform that gives enterprises a complete view into activity and threats on devices and networks. Frictionless to deploy, Armis integrates with existing IT infrastructure and gives businesses visibility into and management over any device, whether on or off the corporate network. With Armis, enterprises are able to gain the productivity benefits of using IoT devices without sacrificing security.

“Enterprise security has a huge blind spot,” said Yevgeny Dibrov, CEO and co-founder of Armis. “The recent botnet attacks like Mirai, Hajime, and Persirai show how new IoT devices are being exploited and attacked. The fact is you cannot put an agent on most of the devices in an organization today, which means we need a new approach. We built Armis to give enterprises complete visibility into all devices in their environment without requiring an agent. We can stop devices from compromising corporate assets, regardless of whether those devices are managed by IT.”

“My job is to stay ahead of the bad guys — especially when it comes to IoT. Armis allows me to see and control every device using any networking protocol, as well as all the networks in and around our labs. The fact that Armis can block unwanted connections is critical to our security strategy,” said Steven Lentz, Chief Security Officer at Samsung Research America.

Founded in late 2015, and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with an office in Tel Aviv, the Armis team is comprised of top engineering talent from Israel and experienced Silicon Valley technology leaders. Armis CEO and co-founder Yevgeny Dibrov was on the executive team at Adallom, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2015. He served with co-founder and CTO Nadir Izrael in the selective Unit 8200 of the Israeli Defense Forces, whose alumni also founded Check Point, Waze (acquired by Google) and Wix.

Gili Raanan, general partner at Sequoia, was the first to partner with Armis, and Tom Banahan, managing director at Tenaya Capital, joined to close this round of investment. Additional investors include Zohar Zisapel, founder and chairman of RAD Technologies; René Bonvanie, CMO of Palo Alto Networks; and Mickey Boodaei, founder of Imperva and Trusteer.

“The exponential growth of IoT introduces risk that most enterprises are not prepared to handle,” said Gili Raanan of Sequoia. “Yevgeny and Nadir’s strong vision combined with their decision to blend top Israeli engineering talent with sales and marketing executives from Cylance, Intel, McAfee and Symantec set them up for success.”

“Armis presents a big opportunity to help enterprises navigate the uncharted territory of IoT in the workplace,” said Tom Banahan of Tenaya Capital. “We were impressed with how the team has really listened to their customers to deliver what businesses need. This means Armis is solving a very real problem for their customers with discovery of unmanaged devices and stopping unauthorized access to their networks.”

Armis will take a channel-first approach to its sales strategy, with early partners in JCS and RedSky. “JCS has long recognized that IoT devices bring a new security frontier that needs to be addressed. We have partnered with Armis to help our customers leverage the promise of the future while keeping their devices and systems safe from the new attacks like Mirai.” said Jim Shaeffer, JCS & Associates, Inc., CEO.

To learn more about Armis please visit: www.armis.com.

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About Armis

Armis is the first agentless, enterprise-class security platform to address the new threat landscape of unmanaged and IoT devices. Fortune 1000 companies trust our unique out-of-band sensing technology to discover and analyze all managed, unmanaged, and IoT devices—from traditional devices like laptops and smartphones to new unmanaged smart devices like smart TVs, webcams, printers, HVAC systems, industrial robots, medical devices and more. Armis discovers devices on and off the network, continuously analyzes endpoint behavior to identify risks and attacks, and protects critical information and systems by identifying suspicious or malicious devices and quarantining them. Armis is a privately held company and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

About Bain Capital Ventures

Bain Capital Ventures partners with disruptive founders to accelerate their ideas to market. The firm invests from seed to growth in startups driving transformation across industries, from security and cloud infrastructure to logistics and e-commerce to finance and healthcare. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 240 companies, including DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, Lime, LinkedIn, Rapid7, Redis Labs, Rent the Runway, Rubrik, SendGrid and SurveyMonkey. Bain Capital Ventures has $5.2 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Palo Alto. Follow the firm via LinkedIn and Twitter.