Huntress: Tripling Down on Protecting the 99%

On behalf of our team, I’m excited to announce Huntress’ $60 million Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with the continued participation of Forgepoint and JMI Equity. 

Huntress provides accessible managed endpoint detection and response (EDR) so small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can monitor, prevent, and respond to devastating cyber threats like ransomware and malicious footholds. 

SMBs represent the vast majority of all businesses and face a growing risk from cyber attacks while lacking effective in-house capabilities to combat them. Huntress’ Managed Security Platform is purpose-built to help, and partners with managed service providers (MSPs), managed security service providers (MSSPs), and value-added resellers (VARs), to serve their end-customers at a price point SMBs can afford. 

When I first met Co-Founders  Kyle Hanslovan, Chris Bisnett, and John Ferrell in 2019, I was struck by their vision and commitment to providing ‘Cybersecurity for the 99%’. As former offensive hackers for the NSA, they were familiar with gaining footholds without being noticed. Their goal of inverting their proven methodology to protect SMBs made so much sense – and fit perfectly with our team’s investment thesis in wanting to address the needs of such a vastly underserved and vulnerable market. 

We were honored to lead their Series A in early 2020 and gratified to see that from day one, their approach has played out and remained true. Everything Huntress has achieved is exactly as they imagined. Thanks to their people, processes, and technology, they’ve built the right team and found ways to execute at a very high level to deliver outstanding results. End-users and non-cyber IT practitioners alike can take advantage of their purpose-built, usable platform, which combines world class threat intelligence, automation, and human threatops expertise at SaaS convenience and SMB affordability.

When their Series B rolled around in May 2021, continuing our partnership was a no-brainer. In addition to expanding their solution into a more robust platform, the Huntress team became maniacally focused on delivering excellence to its rapidly growing base of partners and customers – all while preserving the company’s intentional and inclusive culture. 

Fast forward to today’s Series C. In the past two years alone, Huntress has grown its product and engineering teams to support a maturing platform, evolved its leadership team to guide critical business decisions, doubled ARR in both 2021 and 2022, to now serving thousands of partners and nearly 100,000 end-customers – protecting over 2 million endpoints. 

The company has made smart build/buy decisions as well – evident in its acquisitions of Level Effect’s EDR technology in 2021 and cybersecurity awareness training company Curricula in 2022. The company’s recent MDR solution for Microsoft 365 is the latest effort to build SMBs’ needs into the Huntress platform. 

Huntress also leads the way in publishing actionable threat intelligence. They are often at the forefront in educating the cybersecurity industry on emerging threats, for example on the Kaseya ransomware attack, the critical vulnerability that impacted the widely used Java logging package log4J, and the recent 3CX supply chain compromise. 

As Forgepoint “triples down” on Huntress, and Huntress prepares to double ARR yet again in 2023, we couldn’t be more proud to support the great work of the team and continue our collaboration. We are thrilled to partner with Sapphire Ventures and JMI Equity, and are excited to welcome Casber Wang and Mahau Ma to Huntress’ board of directors. With growth opportunities across SMB markets around the world, an increasingly powerful platform and capable team, and this critical infusion of capital, Huntress is well on its way to becoming the undisputed cybersecurity leader for SMBs globally.