CyberArk Announces Acquisition of Venafi in $1.54 Million Deal
Information security giant CyberArk has announced the acquisition of cybersecurity company Venafi in a US$1.54 billion (A$2.3 billion) deal with Thoma Bravo.
With the acquisition, the security company founded in Israel and based in the United States seeks to strengthen its machine-to-machine (M2M) security.
“This acquisition marks a critical milestone for CyberArk, allowing us to advance our vision of protecting every identity – human and machine – with the appropriate level of privilege controls,” CyberArk CEO Matt Cohen said in a statement. .
“By combining forces with Venafi, we are expanding our capabilities to protect machine identities in a post-quantum, GenAI, cloud-first world.
“Our integrated technologies, capabilities and expertise will address the needs of global enterprises and empower CISOs to defend against increasingly sophisticated attacks that leverage human and machine identities as part of the attack chain.” .
Venafi is considered an expert in public key infrastructure (PKI) security and focuses on ensuring that data flow between devices is secure and authorized at every step.
“Digital transformation and continued migration to the cloud have led to an exponential increase in the number of machine identities, such as workloads, code, applications, IoT devices, and containers,” CyberArk said in its statement.
“The number of machines is rapidly outpacing the growth of their human counterparts, with more than 40 machine identities for every human identity. If they are not protected, they serve as a lucrative hunting ground for cybercriminals.”
CyberArk will pay Thoma Bravo, which has majority ownership in Venafi, $1 billion in cash and approximately $540 million in stock. The deal is expected to close in the second half of this year.
This also marks a significant jump in Venafi’s valuation, which was previously $1.15 billion when it was valued in December 2020, when Thoma Bravo made a growth investment in the company.
With the deal, thanks to Venafi’s strong cloud security, CyberArk said its total addressable market will increase from nearly $10 billion to $60 billion.
It also expects Venafi to increase its annual recurring revenue by $150 million, a huge figure considering Cyber Ark reported $221.6 million in total revenue and a 70 percent increase in subscription revenue in the first trimester.
