Enterprise Security Startup Tanium Gets $90M From Andreessen Horowitz

Heavy duty enterprise security management startup Tanium raised $90 million in its first venture funded financing from Andreessen Horowitz. This is the venture capital firm's second-largest investment ever and a huge vote of confidence for the security firm.

Aimed at big customers with big security needs (the global 2000), Berkeley, California-based Tanium allows IT pros with highly distributed enterprise architectures to detect and mitigate damages from outages and cyber-attacks. Their edge is giving real-time visibility and access to data in seconds rather than hours, days or weeks it takes usually.

It helps distribute and install updates and shut down processes or executables instantaneously.

The enterprise security management company's technology acts as the “central nervous system” for half of the Fortune 100, five of the top 10 largest global banks and four of the top 10 global retailers, it said. Founded in 2007, Tanium spent five years building and refining its technology and now has a completely new communications architecture that addresses challenges posed by modern enterprise networks.

Tanium collects and processes billions of metrics across endpoints in real time and lets enterprises rapidly change the state of those endpoints. It allows proactive identification and fixing of operational issues.

“Enterprise networks have grown exponentially during the last decade while the technology to secure and manage these systems has stagnated. The result is that simple, preventable issues [that] result in debilitating outages and attacks cannot be identified or managed until it’s too late,” said Orion Hindawi, co-founder and CTO of Tanium. “By completely rethinking how IT professionals manage, secure and maintain the end points in their network Tanium gives them the ability to interrogate, manage, update and secure their systems in a fraction of the time.”

Andreessen Horowitz is a major investor in the tech space, and this sizeable round can be viewed as a major endorsement. The $950 million Menlo Park-based venture capital firm that was launched in 2009.

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are the general partners. Most recently, the firm invested in Mesosphere, a startup with technology that aims to centralize management of IT resources across multiple data centers and clouds.

With the latest bet on Tanium, there's perhaps a mini-theme emerging to their investments, which is centralized management and security across increasingly distributed computer systems.

Tanium also announced the appointment of Steven Sinofsky, board partner at Andreessen Horowitz, to its board of directors.

“The Tanium team has accomplished nothing short of a complete reinvention of how IT professionals manage, secure, and maintain the endpoints in their network: every node on the network can now be interrogated, managed, updated and secured, instantly from a browser,” Sinofsky said. “As an already successful and profitable company with dozens of customers in massive, mission-critical and global deployments, this type of innovative and inventive technology can only come about from a team with years of experience and a depth of understanding of the enterprise.”