Dragosa company that builds software to secure control systems for manufacturing and industrial equipment, has raised $74 million in a Series D extension round led by WestCap.
The round, which brought Dragos’ total funds to $440 million, left the startup’s post-money valuation unchanged for a second year at $1.7 billion. Robert Lee, CEO of Dragos, says the new funds will be allocated to “continue to grow and expand” the company’s client base, which numbers about 400 organizations and governments.
“The shares provide Dragos with the greatest amount of operational flexibility,” Lee told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The extension of Series D funding will enhance Dragos’ ability to make industrial cybersecurity more accessible around the world.”
Lee co-founded Dragos City in Hanover, Maryland with Justin Caveney and John Lavender several years ago, inspired by his time in the US Air Force as a cyber warfare operations officer. Through Dragos, Lee hoped to help asset owners and operators — specifically those in industries such as electricity, water, oil and gas, and chemicals — protect infrastructure from threat actors targeting monitoring, management, and control of devices in industrial environments.
Data suggests that attacks on these devices, known as industrial control systems, are increasing not only in frequency, but also in sophistication. Waterfall Security Solutions, a competitor of Dragos, mentioned 57 attacks on industrial control systems in 2022 – a 140% increase in the number of attacks compared to the previous year.
Meanwhile, recently reconnaissance The ABS Group, an advisory group for the oil, gas, marine and offshore chemicals sectors, revealed that 45% of organizations believe threats to their control systems are “high”, while a further 15% agree they are “severe or critical”. “
Frost and Sullivan Expect The global market for industrial cybersecurity will reach $10.2 billion by 2025, up from $3.3 billion in 2020.
“Bad actors are leveraging cyberattacks to target and take control of the world’s industrial infrastructure environments,” Lee said. “Once a relatively “air gap,” industrial controls have become increasingly linked to information technology networks.”
Dragos attempts to secure these controls by providing clear visibility into an organization’s assets and communications. The company’s platform leverages analytics to identify threats, helps prioritize vulnerabilities and provides a playbook for responding to attacks.
Lee claims that Dragos is one of the few industrial control security vendors that offers a managed hunting and threat intelligence service to customers. Dragos searches for and reports threat activity within the ICS environment, and allows customers to optionally and anonymously share threat information with the broader community.
Dragos, which has a workforce of 500 people, has been focused on expanding aggressively over the past few months. In the spring and summer, its presence increases in Western Europe, especially in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It expanded its presence in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; It entered into an agreement with IT consulting company Macnica to provide Dragos products in Japan. Just in August, Dragos signed a three-year deal with the Singapore government’s cybersecurity arm, to support the country’s efforts to defend against cyber attacks on operational technology and critical infrastructure.
Besides direct agreements and customer engagement, Dragos is making efforts to launch its own partner program. The program, which launched this year as the Dragos Global Partner Program, offers training to partners who resell, manage and deploy its platform, including Dragos’ asset discovery and threat detection services.
In a previous interview, Lee said Dragos’ intention is to eventually IPO. It seems like it’s just a matter of time.