Menlo Security secures $40 million Series C to keep malware at bay

Menlo Security, a startup with a unique approach to protecting your company from malware and phishing attacks, announced a $40 million Series C round today.

Menlo protects customers by never letting employees access an actual website or email containing malware. Instead, they isolate the original in a container, then display a clean mirror image in the browser, which has been stripped of any of the bad stuff. The thinking goes that if the malware never reaches you, it can’t harm you.

As CEO and co-founder Amir Ben-Efraim explained after the company’s $25 million Series B round in 2015, “We isolate all web pages and email in the cloud (either public or private). As content gets isolated, it never makes it to the end point. This eliminates the malware at an architectural level.”

It’s an effective approach, as Ben-Efraim reports that they now have more than a million users at hundreds of customers and have had zero infections to date.

Those kind of results are resonating with customers and investors alike, he says. “We have now at this point hundreds of customers, mostly from the Global 2000. There has been a tremendous uptick in adoption. We are hitting the nail on the head in terms of impact we’ve been having. The big breaches over the last couple of years [often] trace back to an end user being targeted by malware,” Ben-Efraim said.

This round of funding adds several strategic investors including American Express Ventures, Ericsson Ventures and HSBC. Menlo’s existing investors JPMorgan Chase, General Catalyst, Sutter Hill Ventures, Osage University Partners and Engineering Capital also participated. The company has now raised over $85 million.

Tim Dawson, who is head of cyber technology at HSBC, says they are always looking for innovative security solutions. “Cyber security is a top priority for us. This investment is an example of how as threats constantly evolve, we will continue to dedicate time and resources to the challenge, exploring innovative ways to protect our clients and staff,” he said in a statement.

The company currently has 125 employees, but Ben-Efraim expects that to increase to close to 200 by the end of 2018. “Series C is tends to be about accelerating go-to market motion,” he said, and to that end, they intend to concentrate those hires on building a worldwide sales and marketing team in the coming year.