Cysiv: Why We Invested

As Forescout announces the completion of the Cysiv merger, Forgepoint Capital wishes Partha Panda, Justin Foster, David Roth, Kathleen Thomas, George McTaggart and the entire team at Cysiv well-deserved congratulations. Now officially a part of Forescout, the best is yet to come for the Cysiv team and their customers.

Forgepoint Capital first invested in Cysiv less than three years ago, after working with Trend Micro to spinout Cysiv as an independent company. What an incredible journey it has been!

At Forgepoint, we back entrepreneurs collectively building a more secure digital future. Ours is a mission that matters, and we draw energy from inspiring teams building elegant products that solve previously intractable challenges. That’s the story behind our investment in Cysiv.

Cysiv was borne of the vision of Partha and Justin, who recognized that traditional approaches to security operations were ineffective because most security operations centers (SOCs) relied on outdated and disparate technologies that were manually intensive, complex, and slow. Worse, noisy false positives compounded challenges for already scarce talent. After incubating the project within Trend Micro for over two years, Partha and Justin teamed up with Forgepoint Capital, which led the $26 million Series A financing to spinout the detection and response platform as a new entity in 2020.

So what prompted our initial investment?

As we considered the opportunity – and worked through the details of carving out a complex development project with a deep code base from within a public company – we instantly recognized that the team was ready to build meaningful traction with some of the largest global enterprises across key verticals. Feedback from our Advisory Council and early design partners was incredibly positive. We were also drawn to Cysiv’s

• Technology. Cysiv had built best-in-class technology. Through smart architectural and engineering decisions, and by embracing data science and automation, Cysiv had created a modern, cloud native platform to address the threat detection and response requirements of CISOs and SecOps leaders, across the globe.
• Team. Partha had assembled a fantastic team of innovators and builders. We saw a passionate and technically capable team that would benefit from augmenting their go to market efforts, and focus on growing their core market opportunity. As company builders, we pride ourselves in being able to help scale early-stage businesses in large and growing market segments.
• Traction. Cysiv quickly added as customers across industries and sizes, from mid-sized enterprises in banking, finance, automotive and manufacturing to well-funded, high-growth and public companies in fintech, insurance, healthtech, consumer, and B2B services. Early partnerships with Google Cloud and Forescout proved productive.

Post investment, we went to work by helping Cysiv recruit key executives to accelerate the growth trajectory of the company. We also leveraged our network to open doors to new customers. Being able to add value post-investment is core to our investment philosophy at Forgepoint.

Forescout is a global leader in automated cybersecurity. With this acquisition, the Cysiv data analytics platform will now be able to analyze a wealth of asset and network communications data automatically collected by Forescout’s platform from connected IT, IoT, OT and IoMT devices. Cysiv’s combination with Forescout supercharges value to customers by delivering broad threat detection and response across all managed and unmanaged assets. The work both companies have achieved in partnership over the past year proving out customer value has truly been impressive, further demonstrating how the culture at both teams is quite complementary.

Forgepoint will become shareholders post-acquisition, and we look forward to once again working alongside Wael Mohamed, CEO at Forescout and longtime member of our Advisory Council. Alongside Advent International, we are also excited by the opportunity to collaborate with Greg Clark (another Forgepoint Advisory Council member) and our friends at Crosspoint Capital. We are grateful for Trend Micro for collaborating with us through this stage of the company’s journey and supporting the combination; Cysiv’s success would not have been possible without their vision driving the spinout to create a new leader in the SOC-as-a-Service market.

On behalf of the entire Forgepoint Capital team, Alberto and I could not be more proud of this hardworking, visionary team for achieving this milestone. We are extremely excited about Cysiv and Forescout’s future together and look forward to seeing this team reshape how our industry delivers effective data-powered threat detection and response. Welcome to the Forgepoint portfolio family, Forescout!