Enterprise Cloud Security Startup Skyhigh Raises $40M

Skyhigh Networks, an enterprise cloud security startup that claims to have 40 percent of the Fortune 500 list as its customers, has raised $40 million in a Series D funding round.

The four-year-old company helps enterprises secure cloud control points for IaaS, Paas, and SaaS. It says it has 600 enterprise customers, including Equinix, Hewlett-Packard, Aetna, Comcast, and Viacom.

Skyhigh and its competitors, companies like Netskope and Bitglass, are benefitting from a growing enterprise cloud market as enterprises increasingly outsource infrastructure and applications to cloud service providers and want to have centralized security and controls over all cloud services deployed across the enterprise.

Skyhigh automatically detects all cloud services used by an organization, analyzes them for abnormal behavior, and enforces security and usage policies.

The latest round brings Skyhigh’s total money raised to $105.5 million. New investor, Thomvest Ventures, led the round, and previous investors, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, joined.

Stock issued in the round was 9 percent lower than in its previous 2014 round, leading to its characterization as a “down round.” The Wall Street Journal pointed to the round as the latest example in a string of recent down rounds by tech startups.

Skyhigh CEO Rajiv Gupta, however, said Series D was not a down round, since the company’s overall value has gone up. Individual share price went down because the volume of shares was higher, due to more generous stock options the company has been issuing its employees, he told Fortune.

“We just closed the biggest quarter in Skyhigh’s history and are thrilled to be raising money from top tier investors in an up round,” Gupta told the Journal.