Corelight Secures $25 Million in Series B Funding Led by General Catalyst

PRESS RELEASE

San Francisco, Calif. — Sept. 11, 2018 — Corelight, providers of the most powerful network visibility solution for cybersecurity, today announced it has secured an additional $25 million in Series B financing led by General Catalyst. With this additional round of capital, the company will accelerate investments in product development, research, sales, and marketing with the aim of delivering new capabilities for network defense.

“The question today isn’t if the bad guys have access to your network – they do – but instead,  what they’ve done once they’ve gotten in,” said Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst, and former CTO of VMware. “Corelight helps security professionals get to breach impact and remediation faster. Their network intelligence approach is a strong complement to GC’s security portfolio and is already demonstrating exceptional product market fit. We’re privileged to be partnering with them today.”

“This investment opens a new chapter in our history, and we’re happy to have found another exceptional board member in Steve Herrod,” said Greg Bell, CEO of Corelight.  “Over the past year we’ve greatly expanded our product line and enjoyed significant commercial traction.  More organizations are turning to Corelight to provide detailed, real-time data for network defense. This new investment will help us address their needs faster and more comprehensively. We are just getting started.”

Corelight was founded by Dr. Vern Paxson (a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and Chief Scientist at Corelight), Dr. Robin Sommer (CTO) and Seth Hall (Chief Evangelist) to deliver network visibility solutions for cybersecurity built on an open source framework called Bro. Paxson began developing Bro in 1995 when he was working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); the name refers to George Orwell's "Big Brother" as it signals the need for operators of network monitoring to remain mindful of their users' rights and privacy. 

Today, Corelight has merged the power of Bro with a suite of enterprise features that make Bro dramatically easier to deploy in enterprise environments, like an intuitive management UI, native NIC shunting, sensor health metrics, and automated data export to Splunk, Elastic, Kafka, Syslog, S3, and more. 

Corelight plans to continue to expand internationally with increased investment in global sales infrastructure and build out additional strategic partner alliances domestically and abroad.

In a separate press release issued today, the company also announced that world-renowned cybersecurity veteran and former chief security strategist at FireEye, Richard Bejtlich has joined Corelight as principal security strategist. In this role, Bejtlich will work with the company's executive team to help align product development with enterprise needs.  

Today’s news comes on the heels of the company’s recent launch of the Corelight Virtual Sensorwhich enables more pervasive monitoring and allows organizations to flexibly monitor traffic anywhere virtual infrastructure is deployed at speeds up to 2 Gbps and is scalable across four reference configurations for VMware.

About Corelight

Corelight delivers the most powerful network visibility solutions for information security professionals, helping them understand network traffic and defend their organizations more effectively. Corelight solutions are built on a foundation of Bro, the powerful and widely-used open source network analysis framework that generates actionable, real-time data for thousands of security teams worldwide. Bro data has become the ‘gold standard’ for incident response, threat hunting, and forensics in large enterprises and government agencies worldwide. Corelight makes a family of network sensors - both physical and virtual, at every scale - that take the pain out of deploying open-source Bro by adding integrations and capabilities large organizations need. The Bro project was initially developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), and has been supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). Corelight is based in San Francisco, Calif. For more information, visit https://www.corelight.com or follow @corelight_inc.