Skyport Raises $30M from GV and Cisco Investments to Ramp Delivery of Zero-Trust Secure Computing Infrastructure to the Enterprise

PRESS RELEASE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – March 15, 2016 – Skyport Systems, the company redefining enterprise security architecture, today announced a $30 million round of funding, enabling the company to expand sales and marketing and accelerate its research and development programs. The round was led by GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), with participation from Cisco Investments, Thomvest Ventures, Northgate Capital and InstantScale as well as all existing investors Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Intel Capital. This Series C round brings total Skyport funding to $67M.

Businesses are aggressively spending to secure their computing infrastructure, yet continue to be affected by system breaches and information theft. Skyport’s team – comprised of founding engineers from Cisco and Juniper – delivers next-generation infrastructure built to actively and continually protect the business-critical systems it hosts. 

“Enterprise IT leaders are balancing a portfolio of diverse workloads and applications in hybrid environments – with different services requiring different IT models. Some services will migrate seamlessly to the cloud, while other mission-critical systems will continue to be run in-house and require state-of-the-art secured infrastructure like Skyport,” said GV general partner Dave Munichiello. “Skyport’s next-generation infrastructure is based on a zero-trust approach that assumes all networks are continually breached. Their solution integrates security, virtualization, and policy into a pre-configured, managed-infrastructure platform – essentially a hardened server that is constantly communicating and verifying its security state.” 

Skyport SkySecure delivers an easy-to-use secure infrastructure for protecting IT environments from attacks while providing total visibility into all traffic and administrative changes. Delivered as a completely integrated system, Skyport Systems SkySecure is the first commercial Hyper-Secure Infrastructure architected from the ground up to provide continuous validation to ensure system integrity and remote management to ensure auditability. It can be easily deployed in 30 minutes to protect an organization’s critical workloads. Since its launch in May 2015, Skyport Systems SkySecure has seen rapid adoption by government entities, institutions of higher education, enterprises and SMEs seeking to safeguard their most critical IT assets.

“Security leaders have been saying for decades that security needs to be built in from the ground up yet most solutions just bolt on or around. If organizations are serious about protecting their information they need to consider that now is the time to re-platform for security.” said Art Gilliland, CEO of Skyport Systems. “Skyport Systems’ approach delivers powerful security protections in a pre-integrated easy-to-use system saving customers money and helping them achieve a high level of security and compliance.”        

Additional Supporting Quotes 

"Security is one of Cisco’s top priorities as a company and we look for investment opportunities that represent unique and disruptive approaches to today’s security architectures. We’re excited to invest in Skyport because of their unique approach of converging compute, security and hybrid cloud to build a solution to host and safeguard critical applications.”

- Rob Salvagno, VP of corporate development and head of Cisco Investments, Cisco

“Skyport’s SkySecure platform has met with an exceptional response since becoming generally available in 2015. As technology megatrends like cloud computing and the Internet of Things continue to escalate interconnection vulnerabilities, and as hackers evolve in tandem, the benefits of Skyport’s hybrid approach to locking down critical data assets are increasingly obvious. We believe SkySecure is and will remain at the forefront of intelligent defensive security solutions.”

- Mike Volpi, general partner at Index Ventures

“In my nearly two decades as an investor, Skyport is one of the only solutions I’ve seen that so matches user needs on multiple fronts, from technology to operations and organization. Security needs to adapt to the times, yet enterprises and a large majority of today’s security providers ill-advisedly insist on perimeter, endpoint protections authentication offerings that are completely out-of-date. By building, from-the-ground-up, an unbreakable platform to shield critical applications and data, Skyport is poised to become the security standard for enterprise data centers.” 

- Hayes Drumwright, general partner, InstantScale

“Skyport presents one of the most compelling advanced enterprise data center security solutions on the market – with the power to radically change the way we think about workloads and security. As security and vulnerability continue to be of immense importance for organizations across all sectors, Skyport is powered by an outstanding team with a vital security platform that exemplify the type of innovation opportunity that we all seek to have and to build on in our investment portfolios.”

- Thorsten Claus, director, Northgate Capital

“The gap enterprises face in securing their data centers has fostered an environment in which a multitude of companies are competing to deliver a major new security platform that delivers both best-in-class security and operational simplicity. We continue to make a big bet that the Skyport team and its SkySecure platform will provide that solution for an increasingly wide range of organizations."

- Stefan Dyckerhoff, managing director, Sutter Hill Ventures 

"Enterprises are desperate to close the data vulnerability holes that leave their most valuable IT assets exposed. We are very impressed with the maturity of Skyport’s organization and solution. It is the only company we've seen that truly understands how to provide comprehensive, end-to-end lifecycle security through strategic insertion, without requiring a complete re-architecting of an organization’s infrastructure.”

- Don Butler, managing director, Thomvest Ventures

Supporting resources

To learn more about Skyport Systems, visit http://www.skyportsystems.com/ or read our blog.

About Skyport Systems

Skyport Systems delivers a remotely managed platform that establishes a secure enclave for the enterprise’s most critical applications. Skyport Systems’ SkySecure is the first turn-key and security-embedded platform in the commercial marketplace to re-architect compute, security, and virtualization into a single technology stack, keeping data on-premises and mission-critical IT and assets safe. Skyport is funded by Sutter Hill Ventures and Intel Capital. For more information: www.skyportsystems.com.