eSentire Raises $14 Million Series C Equity Investment Led by Georgian Partners, Cisco Investments, Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund, Edison Partners, VentureLink to Accelerate Market Leadership

CAMBRIDGE, ON--(Marketwired - Sep 16, 2014) - eSentire, Inc., a leader in Active Threat Protection solutions and managed security services today announced that it had completed a $14M (CAD) Series C investment round led by Georgian Partners with participation from Cisco Investments and Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund along with existing investors Edison Partners and VentureLink.

Recognized as the leading security service provider to more than 450 financial services firms, legal, extractive and healthcare organizations, eSentire will use the equity investment to expand its technical capabilities and fuel its growth by expanding services into new sectors including critical infrastructure and IP based markets such as technology and bio-pharma.

"Georgian Partners invests in proven growth. eSentire has established itself as a true market leader displacing and out-pacing its larger counterparts," said Georgian Partners Managing Partner Simon Chong.

eSentire pioneered Continuous Advanced Threat Protection, which leading analyst firm Gartner Research began covering in June of this year as a best practices framework for defending against the most egregious cyber security attacks. eSentire's solution delivers continuous monitoring, real-time threat detection and containment technology as a service with human threat analysts on a 24x7x365 basis. eSentire challenges legacy security approaches, combining behavior-based analytics, immediate mitigation and advanced threat intelligence.

"Cisco is committed to fostering innovation in Canada that supports our vision of the opportunity the Internet of Everything represents. Cybercrime is a growing and continued threat to all facets of life around the world. We believe eSentire will continue to meet this challenge as the company grows its global footprint," said Cisco Canada President Nitin Kawale.

"Stock trading and banking regulatory bodies, including the SEC and FINRA in the United States and the FCA in the United Kingdom, are fixated on cybersecurity threats and the inherent risk they pose to the global economy," said eSentire CEO J.Paul Haynes. "We live in a world where the rate of advanced targeted attacks against all businesses increases every day of every week," Haynes added and went on to say, "it is great that such prominent investors are backing eSentire's innovation vision that will enable us to remain a few steps ahead of the bad guys. In our Cambridge, Ontario research facility we are developing some of the most advanced forensic and threat detection capabilities available to the commercial sector giving them capabilities normally reserved for three letter agencies."

The company said it intends to immediately hire 40 new positions to its research facility to keep pace with demand. 

About Georgian Partners
Georgian Partners is a growth equity firm investing in expansion stage Enterprise Software, Internet and Information companies that are exploiting Applied Analytics: the convergence of Cloud-based business solutions, Big Data, and broad Information Rights. Founded by successful entrepreneurs and technology executives, Georgian Partners leverages our global software expertise to be able to directly impact the success of companies. For more information, visit www.georgianpartners.com.

About Edison Partners
For 28 years, Edison Partners has been helping CEOs and their executive teams navigate the entrepreneurial journey to becoming successful companies. Through the unique combination of expansion capital and the Edison Edge platform, consisting of strategic advisory, the Edison Director Network, and executive education, Edison employs a holistic approach to nurturing invention and creating value for growth stage businesses ($5 to $20 million in revenue) in financial technology, healthcare IT, enterprise IT, and interactive marketing industries. Edison investment objectives also include: buyouts, recapitalizations, spinouts and secondary stock purchases. The Edison portfolio has created aggregate market value exceeding $5 billion. Its long-tenured team, based in Lawrenceville, NJ, New York, NY, McLean, VA and Cleveland, OH, currently manages more than $850 million in active investments throughout the eastern United States. For more information please visit www.edisonpartners.com.

About Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund
Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund is a joint initiative between major Canadian institutional investors and the governments of Canada and Ontario to invest primarily in Canada-based venture capital and growth equity funds and direct co-investments that support innovative, high-growth companies. NVCF is structured as a fund of funds with the primary objective of generating attractive returns for its investors. The Fund is managed by Northleaf Capital Partners. For more information on Northleaf, visit www.northleafcapital.com.

About VentureLink
VentureLink Innovation Fund manages a maturing portfolio of investments in both technology and traditional industry companies that are all based out of the province of Ontario, Canada. An early supporter, VentureLink has been a participant in each of eSentire's three institutional investment rounds. For more information, visit www.venturelinkfunds.com/.

About eSentire
eSentire^® is the leader in Active Threat Protection solutions and services, the most comprehensive way to defend enterprises from advanced and never-before-seen cyber threats. eSentire's flagship offering, Network Interceptor, challenges legacy security approaches, combining behavior-based analytics, immediate mitigation and actionable intelligence on a 24x7x365 basis. The company's dedicated team of security experts continuously monitors customer networks to detect and block cyber attacks in real-time. Protecting more than $2.0 trillion in combined assets, eSentire is the trusted choice for security decision-makers in financial services, healthcare, mining, energy, engineering and construction, legal services, and technology companies. In late 2013, eSentire was named to the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Companies to Watch and cited as a Canadian Innovation Exchange CIX Top 20 most innovative Canadian company. For more information visit www.esentire.com and follow @esentire.