BalaBit Secures $8M for Business-Friendly IT Security

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - Jun 18, 2014) - BalaBit (www.balabit.com), a Europe-based IT security innovator, has raised a $8 million Series A round of funding to speed up the development and expansion of its pioneering IT security platforms. The new investment will be used to fuel BalaBit's international expansion in North America and additional European markets including the UK and Scandinavia. The cash was raised from London based C5 Capital, Europe's first dedicated investor in the security and data sector.

Using the strong financial backing by C5 Capital, BalaBit aims to aggressively establish its revolutionary new security concept called Contextual Security Intelligence™ on an international scale. Adopting new information technologies is the key factor of competitiveness today, and IT security is often complex for any company or organization. Security control can hinder IT projects and other business processes. In the last decade, companies invested significant amounts of money into monitoring technologies mainly for IT management and compliance reasons, but not for IT security. It seems that for companies today security means control, and this is what Contextual Security Intelligence aims to change and establish for business-friendly IT security.

"Control tools are often inefficient against human intelligence and behavior. Control is ideal to protect against automatic attacks executed by machines but often fails against individual behavior," said Zoltán Györkő, CEO and co-founder of BalaBit. "If IT security officers keep increasing the control, they will not be more successful in maintaining the required security level, and may encounter user resistance. Instead, they should explore what happens in their network and interfere if necessary. This is exactly what Contextual Security Intelligence is about. We are working hard to launch a new generation of IT security product to help companies focusing their security resources and replacing some old-school control tools, in the spirit of business efficiency."

Control failures are in today's headlines: Sony, Target, Adobe and eBay all had serious security breaches in spite of having sophisticated security controls. Often, the most costly data breaches are well-prepared crimes by insiders or by external attackers who gained internal access to get sensitive company data or infect the network.

"We believe that managing human risk is an under-invested part of information security. BalaBit offers a market-leading suite of products to address this threat. A core component of our investment approach is our 'all hands' engagement, which means we bring all our resources to bear for a small number of companies in order to actively drive value. BalaBit is a representative case as it seeks to launch new products and expands overseas," said Nazo Moosa, Managing Partner at C5 Capital. "We were drawn to BalaBit's first class software development talent and the team. In addition to building out the sales reach of the existing log management and IT security audit products, we are eager to capitalize on the technological innovations inside BalaBit."

BalaBit markets its security products in North America through a series of resellers and system integrators. The company also has strategic partnerships with several US-based security software vendors. To see a list of BalaBit channel partners, please visit BalaBit's Partner Site.

About C5 Capital
C5 Capital is Europe's first dedicated investor in the data and security sector, C5 Capital (www.c5capital.eu). It focuses exclusively on this European market.

C5 makes transformational growth capital investments of $5 - $25 million in fast growing, profitable European companies that operate in the security and data sectors. In return, C5 Capital offers a high level of operational and board support, as well as access to a network of senior advisers and business partners.

Founded by Nazo Moosa, a former founding member of The Carlyle Group's European technology fund. The firm has a fund target of $125 million.

About BalaBit
BalaBit -- headquartered in Luxembourg -- is a European IT security innovator, specialized in advanced monitoring technologies. It has sales offices in France, Germany, Hungary, Russia, in the UK and the United States and partners in 40+ countries. The main development centers are based in Hungary. BalaBit has customers all over the world including 23 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. The company is widely-known for syslog-ng™, its open source log management solution, used by more than a million companies worldwide. This significant user base provides a solid ground for the business expansion which is fueled by Shell Control Box™, a pioneering development for the rapidly-growing niche of privileged activity monitoring market.

For more information, visit www.balabit.com. 

BalaBit™, Shell Control Box™, syslog-ng™ and Contextual Security Intelligence™ are trademarks of BalaBit. All other product names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.