Kiteworks captures $456M at a $1B+ valuation to help secure sensitive data

Mark up another unicorn and large funding round for the cybersecurity industry: Kiteworks, which builds tools to secure email communications, file sharing, and situations where people work with sensitive data, has raised $456 million from Insight Partners and Sixth Street Growth. The investment values the company at over $1 billion.

It’s a notable development for the San Mateo-based startup, which was formerly known as Accellion and suffered a major data breach in 2021. That incident, related to legacy services, impacted at least 300 organizations including Morgan Stanley, the University of California, Kroger and Shell. 

Today, Kiteworks is going strong: It has been profitable for the past two years, and its tools serve 100 million end users and more than 3,650 global enterprises and government agencies.

This investment comes at a time when IT breaches continue to plague users and organizations. But the funding environment overall for startups remains challenging. 

That has resulted in well-performing cybersecurity companies shaping up as consolidators. Wiz earlier this year raised $1 billion to scoop up smaller players, and Kiteworks has similar plans.

Kiteworks said it will be using the money in part to make acquisitions. 

“We have a pretty aggressive M&A strategy that we started about a year-and-a-half ago to two years ago,” chief strategy officer Tim Freestone said in an interview. “This will help fund the continuation of that strategy into the next four years.”

Since 2022, Kiteworks has acquired four smaller enterprise startups. It will also be using funds for hiring, R&D and business development, he added.

The cybersecurity industry has been marked by a very rapid, prolific profusion of startups — partly because the threats that are being addressed constantly evolve, and so enterprising technologists want to pursue those opportunities. Arguably, Kiteworks represents the other side of the cybersecurity story.

The company has been around as a privately-held operation for more than 20 years, so it’s not quite a “startup” in the classic sense. 

And while a lot of the attention in recent years has been around areas like cloud, network/infrastructure, and application security, Kiteworks’ focus has been on data, specifically how to secure sensitive data, regardless of whether it is on-premises, in a cloud, or somewhere else entirely — like a line of information entered in a form on the web. 

“We’re finally at the data layer as an industry, and so that’s helped us,” said Freestone.

One of Kiteworks’ unique selling points has been its specific approach to handling sensitive data as part of what it calls a private content network, or PCN (not to be confused with the other PCN in infosecurity, which stands for process control network). Government organizations, or those who want to supply those organizations, need to adhere to a strong layer of data protection compliance.

Kiteworks claims it is the “only security platform authorized by FedRAMP” in the U.S. providing support for activities like file sharing, file transfer, and email communications to meet those compliance requirements. Some of its solutions are creative: a DRM tool that makes a document appear like the “real” one to a recipient, but is in fact a facsimile — this ensures that most data never leaves the firewall of the sender.

“This investment reinforces Kiteworks’ role in tackling the challenge of managing sensitive data,” said Jonathan Yaron, CEO and chairman of Kiteworks (pictured below). “We’re eager to accelerate our growth and continue innovating to meet our customers’ evolving needs.”

Insight Partners and Sixth Street Growth’s co-investment is coming as a mix of primary and secondary shares in the company. The company is not disclosing the proportions of primary to secondary, but PitchBook data from early July notes that the first tranche of the total sum, designated as growth capital, was $228 million.

Insight, which has put more than $4.5 billion into cybersecurity investments (including in Wiz), believes now is the moment for Kiteworks to double down. 

“With the rise in third-party cybersecurity threats and stringent regulatory requirements, Kiteworks has a large market opportunity in front of them for both organic and inorganic growth,” said Eoin Duane, MD of Insight, in an email to TechCrunch. “Customers love the Kiteworks PCN—there’s strong growth within the existing customer base, and as data security continues to become more important, the company is well-positioned to attract new customers.”