Insight Partners to acquire Armis at a valuation of $1.1 billion
Armis, the leader in enterprise IoT security, has agreed to be acquired by Insight Partners (Insight), a global software investor respected for its track record of scaling up industry disruptors, to further strengthen its market dominance in unmanaged device security.
Under the terms of the agreement, Insight will acquire the company for cash at a valuation of $1.1 billion, with participation from CapitalG for $100 million and rollover from certain existing stockholders.
Armis will continue to operate independently and will be fully managed by its two co-founders, Yevgeny Dibrov, CEO, and Nadir Izrael, CTO, and executive team, while leveraging the support of Insight’s industry leading business strategy and ScaleUp division, Onsite. Closing is expected to occur in February and is subject to customary conditions and approvals.
“Insight is one of the most sophisticated software investors in the sector, and it is due to the depth of their domain expertise that they really understand the enterprise IoT device challenge we are looking to solve, and the size of the market opportunity.
“We considered growth rounds and strategic offers, but by partnering with Insight we have the best of both worlds – operational support and independence, both of which were important in our decision to take on a scaleup partner this early in our company journey,” said Yevgeny Dibrov, co-founder and CEO at Armis.
“We are thankful for the support we received from our investors at Sequoia, Tenaya, Bain, and Red Dot; and we, as well as the whole Armis team, are very excited to have Insight working alongside us as we enter this next phase, accelerating our platform and growth.”
According to Gartner, there will be 25 billion connected devices by 2021. The challenge faced is that these unmanaged and un-agentable devices have no security and represent the fastest growing attack landscape for organizations globally, with attacks up 300% in 2019 alone.
Armis reports that by 2021, up to 90% of all devices will be unmanaged and unsecured – dramatically increasing potential vector points for attack and creating a massive security gap within businesses and organizations.
“One of the biggest challenges keeping CIOs and CISOs up at night is how to secure the unmanaged devices proliferating through their businesses, from manufacturing floors to hospital rooms, from airports to boardrooms. These devices – capturing and creating business critical information, working on production lines, or administering patient care – have no protection and they need a security solution,” said Nadir Izrael, CTO and co-founder at Armis.
“The exponential growth of Armis to date illustrates just how critical securing unmanaged devices is for businesses. With the backing of Insight, we will continue to expand our world class technology to help identify devices, track their behavior and respond to the threats that target them.”
Armis lets organizations safely embrace unmanaged and IoT devices throughout their business. Armis grew significantly in 2018 and continued its tremendous growth in its current fiscal year across all verticals, from the Fortune 100 (including 25% of the Fortune 50) to the Global 2000 to mid-size organizations, across all verticals, including high tech, healthcare, industrial, retail, smart cities/building, transportation, and more. Armis is used by global organizations such as Allergan, Mondelēz, Oracle and Sysco Foods, among others.
“Armis is one of the most ground-breaking enterprise data-centric security solutions that is actively protecting modern businesses today. Having achieved exponential growth to date, we are proud to be the partner Armis can leverage to help execute their vision of protecting unmanaged devices proliferating every vertical around the world. We see the huge problem they are solving,” said Jeff Horing, Managing Director at Insight.
“Armis has established themselves as the leader in the enterprise IoT security space, and we believe this team and their technology will continue to transform the way unmanaged devices are secured.”
Teddie Wardi, Managing Director at Insight, said, “The strength of Israeli security software is unquestionable, and we are thrilled to be the scaleup partner Armis has selected to continue their explosive growth journey. We’ve spoken with their users who have told us how powerful the Armis platform is at device discovery, classification, and continuous threat assessment. In a world of unmanaged devices, Armis’ technology is a game changer.”
“Armis is the largest Israeli Cybersecurity acquisition of a private company ever and this is an important milestone in the Armis journey, building a substantial stand-alone Cybersecurity power-house,” said Gili Raanan Chairman of Armis and General Partner at Sequoia Israel and Cyberstarts.
As part of the acquisition, Insight Founder Jeff Horing, Insight Managing Director Teddie Wardi, and Cyberstarts Founder Gili Raanan will be serving on the Armis Board of Directors.