Empowering the Cloud-First Enterprise: Devo’s Advanced, Cloud-Native Security Analytics Provide a Powerful Defense as the Threat Surface for Business Data Expands Exponentially

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‘Cloud-first’ organizations now outnumber on-premise businesses by a ratio of three to one, according to a new report from Devo, a leader in next-generation, cloud-native security information and event management (SIEM), and an exciting addition to our security portfolio, focused on the components of building out a modern security operations center (SOC) that combines endpoint + network + security analytics.

As investors in Rapid7 and Splunk, we’ve gained significant experience in SIEM and we see Devo as the next wave of SIEM for the cloud-native enterprise. We’ve also seen how the threat landscape has evolved on the network side via Vectra, and we backed Webroot, which provides organizations with multi-vector endpoint protection. 

Barriers to cloud adoption were already lower than ever before the pandemic struck—magnifying the benefits of remote/virtual IT infrastructures, software hosting, and data management. The scale of the ensuing enterprise shift to cloud infrastructure and remote hosting has been driving up security complexity and associated volumes of data, so that this now exceeds the capabilities of legacy security toolsets and the capacity of already-overstretched security teams. 

In this context, Devo—with its cloud-native logging and security analytics platform—is having a huge and fast-growing impact. It is saving enterprise security operations teams untold hours of manual analysis as security data volumes soar, by empowering security analysts to cut through the noise and focus on the threats that matter most.

Actionable analytics: the surge in next-generation SIEM

Next-generation SIEM is big business, and in the cloud-first enterprise market Devo is well ahead of this trend. The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is dedicated to producing the most innovative logging and security analytics platform on the market, and its cloud-native solutions strike right at the heart of current enterprise challenges.

“Digital Transformation, and the massive threat surface associated with it, have elevated security analytics to the centerpiece of frontline cyber defenses. Some of the world’s largest businesses choose Devo because we combine unmatched scale, powerful analytics, and the ability to get answers in real time.

The global market potential ahead of us is absolutely massive, and we’re excited at working with TCV’s sector experts to realize that. What really stands out for us is that the TCV team is as enthusiastic and driven as we are. The new funding validates the disruptive force we have become and sends signal to the industry that we will continue to set the pace for innovation and customer value.”

Marc van Zadelhoff, CEO of Devo

Securing the skies by securing the cloud

Devo has already made a name for itself with some of the most security-sensitive organizations in the world, including the U.S. Air Force, which relies on the company as its central security hub for protection, detection, and response for enterprise defense worldwide. 

Speed and scalability are among its many differentiators: Devo supports thousands of concurrent real-time queries, allowing security teams to query petabyte-sized data sets to answer questions quickly, visualize trends, and perform advanced analytics—so they never miss a critical threat.

Providing unparalleled performance, scalability and clarity, the Devo Platform lets security teams ask more questions, visualize more data, and access valuable analytics to defend and monitor their organization. Its data ingestion capabilities are the industry’s most scalable and flexible. The Devo Platform can ingest data from any source, even if it’s unrecognized or the format changes.

Crucially, it is designed to integrate effortlessly with all of the main enterprise IT environments favored by large enterprises—from software giants like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce, to the big cloud platforms (Google Cloud, AWS) and network providers (Cisco, Juniper) to some of the biggest names in IT security, including Sophos, Symantec, and Check Point. This enables a consolidated view of the security landscape and a single point of actionable analytics.

Suffice to say, Devo’s potential market is substantial—and global—and to date we believe the company has only skimmed the surface of the opportunity.

Major new funding will drive global & vertical expansion

Devo has cemented its leadership in the next gen SIEM and IT Ops markets with accelerating growth driven by enterprise demand for modern, cloud-first, SaaS based, AI/ML driven tools. TCV is proud to have led Devo’s $250 million in Series E funding round, and we look forward to working with a world-class team to provide a better, faster, and more economic value proposition for enterprise customers around the world struggling to keep up with security and performance blind spots.

We anticipate that the new funding will fuel strong growth across new regions and market verticals, and significantly increase investment in channel expansion and product innovation. Plans include growth in new verticals and geographies including an expanded presence in the public sector, as well as internationally in the Asia Pacific region. 

Building on the rapid adoption of Devo as the platform of choice for leading resellers and managed security services providers (MSSPs) across the globe, the company is also redoubling its commitment to the channel and integration partners. Devo also expects to invest heavily in technology alliances, content, and people to build out a global security community to usher in a new era for the industry.

Powered by great people

Of course, it’s the people that make a remarkable and investable business, and again this is where Devo shines. The company is made up of some of the world’s brightest minds, all respected experts in their fields yet from diverse backgrounds—giving Devo breadth as well as depth in its market experience. 

CEO Marc van Zadelhoff took the helm as CEO a year ago, marking the start of a momentous year for the company. He has brought to the company some 20 years’ experience working in cybersecurity for organizations globally, most recently as the COO for LogMeIn, and before that as General Manager for IBM Security—a IBM Business Unit he co-founded. Since assuming leadership of Devo, Marc has driven the company to new heights, evidenced by: 

  • Nearly 100% year-over-year revenue growth
  • Over 100% customer growth, including H&R Block, Manulife, FanDuel, Ulta Beauty and AMEX Global Business Travel
  • More than 400 employees across North America, Europe, and APAC
  • Addition of industry-proven leaders including CSO Gunter Ollmann, SVP of Product Ted Julian, CCO Johannes Loeffler and CFO Jennifer Grunebaum
  • Launch of Devo Content Stream, a new high-value content delivery service for Devo customers

The team Marc is building around him is impressive, combining subject matter expertise and commercial depth. 

Devo and its people are the ideal fit for TCV’s investment strategy. Our track record of supporting portfolio companies for the long term as a crossover investor is well established, and our well-documented successes with other high-growth tech businesses at the intersection of cloud, networking, and security (including Cradlepoint, Silver Peak, HashiCorp, Splunk, Vectra, Rapid7, and Venafi, and more recently Aviatrix) provide a strong hint at the ambitions we have for Devo.

We can’t wait to roll up our sleeves and help Devo capitalize on its global potential.

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of TCMI, Inc. or its affiliates (“TCV”). TCV has not verified the accuracy of any of the data or statements by the author and disclaims any responsibility therefor. This blog post is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any private fund managed or sponsored by TCV or any of the securities of any company discussed. The TCV portfolio companies identified above are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments, and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/all-companies/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this interview and blog post, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website, available at http://www.tcv.com/terms-of-use/.

Building for the Multi-Cloud Era: How Aviatrix is Simplifying, Securing, and Accelerating the Enterprise Cloud Journey

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Companies are increasingly moving their IT infrastructure to multiple public clouds, driving some of the most vibrant growth potential in today’s IT sector. That’s just one reason we are excited to announce that Aviatrix, a leader in cloud networking and network security, is joining the TCV family.

The rapid global shift from on-premise IT infrastructure to public cloud is a once-in-a-generation event that impacts hundreds of billions in legacy spend across security, networking, data infrastructure, IT operations management, and developer tooling. Over the past decade, cloud adoption has increased exponentially, with 80% of enterprises today utilizing two or more public cloud providers (‘multi-cloud’), and 60% of enterprises regarding the move to multi-cloud as one of their most critical strategic IT priorities. The adoption of public cloud, and increasingly multiple public clouds, enables organizations to remove the operational burden of building and managing their own on-premise datacenters. We believe this tectonic shift to “infrastructure-as-a-service” offered by public cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google is analogous to the shift to software-as-a-service a decade ago. We believe the move to the cloud will be much bigger than SaaS and have a profound effect on how applications are built and delivered.

There are many reasons for companies to move to multiple cloud providers. The optionality helps to avoid vendor lock-in, save costs, and enables utilization of best-of-breed tooling from each cloud provider. The multi-cloud approach also increases application performance and reliability and creates flexibility and scalability that’s simply not achievable by single threading on a single cloud provider.

However, the complexity of managing multiple cloud environments for an enterprise is enormous as each cloud environment’s tooling is idiosyncratic, and cloud providers don’t interoperate well with each other—there is simply no economic incentive to do so. Combine all that with the fact that there is a major shortfall of skilled cloud infrastructure talent, and it becomes clear why companies are increasingly looking to software and automation to deliver the true promise of the cloud.

Enter Aviatrix. Founded in Santa Clara, CA, in 2014, Aviatrix provides a cloud network platform that delivers advanced networking, security and operational visibility required by enterprises with the simplicity and automation of cloud. Its platform effectively provides a single pane of glass to manage and automate the inherent complexities of enterprise workloads that are increasingly spread across multiple public cloud providers. The particular problems that Aviatrix solves include network traffic latency, resiliency, scalability, application performance, and network security.

Aviatrix is a pioneer in this market, launching well before other third-party competitors in this space even existed, and the company enjoys hyper growth at scale. It also has a customer base that is highly diversified across different industries and includes household names such as Nike, AbbVie, Disney, Splunk, NASA, Roche, and PwC. In speaking with their customers, we were blown away with both how difficult it is to build what Aviatrix has architected and how much value Aviatrix is able to provide. Aviatrix acts as the brains of any enterprise cloud architecture configuration. The company interprets each individual cloud provider’s language, serving as a common denominator across cloud environments, and empowering IT / cloud / networking teams to realize value from different cloud vendors without needing to be experts in any one vendor. This value proposition extends from individual enterprises to the whole of the cloud provider ecosystem as Aviatrix allows for higher volume and velocity of cloud adoption.

Aviatrix’s key product offerings include:

* CoPilot: a centralized management console providing a global operational view of the enterprise cloud (or multi-cloud) network—an offering available from no other cloud provider. It means administrators can gain insight into the overall performance of their network environment, easily spot performance issues, and monitor network health via intuitive visualizations. Without CoPilot, cloud teams have to stitch together data and view multiple consoles across vendors, and the level of data available from cloud providers is far less granular than what Aviatrix can generate.

* Transit: a basket of networking and security solutions that result in increased bandwidth, connectivity for both multi-cloud and multi-region, and the ability to determine optimal paths for traffic flows to enhance performance. Security solutions include network segmentation (across business units, geographic regions, etc), encrypting traffic flows, provisioning firewalls, and traffic inspection controls. Transit also brings efficiencies to cloud teams through infrastructure as code (via Terraform, a HashiCorp product), facilitating the automation of the manual work otherwise needed when leveraging cloud infrastructure (e.g., configuring certain geographic regions or user groups, etc.)

In addition to the strong technical underpinning of the product built by visionary co-founder Sherry Wei, Aviatrix also benefits from an ambitious, proven, and operationally-focused CEO with deep networking and security experience — Steve Mullaney. Steve is the former interim CEO of Palo Alto Networks and was also CEO of software-defined networking pioneer Nicira. Unable to resist the opportunity to build a next-generation, multi-cloud-first networking, and security giant, he came out of retirement and off the Aviatrix board to become CEO of Aviatrix in early 2019. Since joining, Steve has recruited a world-class team of executives including a new CRO, COO, CPO, and CFO, all of whom share background experienced at firms such as Rubrik, Infoblox, Google, Oracle, and Uber. In a little more than two years, the team has more than doubled the growth rate of the company.

Here at TCV, we’ve been watching Aviatrix for over five years. We took time to cultivate our multi-cloud thesis with deep customer and technical research, so when we met Steve and the team and heard the Aviatrix vision firsthand, there was an immediate mutual understanding of the opportunity ahead.

“We respected how much research Tim and the TCV team did to understand what enterprise customers are dealing with prior to approaching us as an investor. Because they put in the work, they were able to see just how big of an opportunity this is for both of our companies. We’re excited to be working with them.”

Steve Mullaney, CEO of Aviatrix

Steve’s track record and ambition to build an iconic public company aligns perfectly with TCV’s investment strategy. We have a history of supporting portfolio companies for the long term as a crossover investor, investing when companies are private, helping them scale to IPO readiness, and investing again at the IPO and supporting them for many years into their public life. We’ve also been fortunate to back other high growth seminal infrastructure software businesses at the intersection of cloud, networking, and security such as Cradlepoint, Silver Peak, HashiCorp, Splunk, Vectra, Rapid7, and Venafi, and we will lean on that experience to help drive growth at Aviatrix.

We view our investment in Aviatrix as a vote of confidence in Steve and the seasoned team of software and networking execs he has assembled, against the backdrop of one of the biggest trends in technology—the ascent of the cloud. We’re grateful for this new partnership and look forward to building a great, enduring, franchise technology company with Aviatrix and its talented employees.

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The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of TCMI, Inc. or its affiliates (“TCV”). TCV has not verified the accuracy of any of the data or statements by the author and disclaims any responsibility therefor. This blog post is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any private fund managed or sponsored by TCV or any of the securities of any company discussed. The TCV portfolio companies identified above are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments, and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/all-companies/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this interview and blog post, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website, available at http://www.tcv.com/terms-of-use/.

TCV Welcomes Gopi Vaddi as General Partner

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TCV is delighted to announce that Gopi Vaddi, a seasoned investor with broad international experience, has joined the firm as a General Partner. Founded in 1995, TCV has invested over $13 billion in more than 350 consumer and enterprise technology companies, including $2 billion in Europe, where Gopi will be focused. TCV investments in Europe include Believe, FlixMobility, Brillen.de, RELEX Solutions, RMS, Sitecore, Sportradar, Spotify, The Pracuj Group, and WorldRemit.          

Gopi is an excellent fit with TCV’s long-term strategy and focus of investing across geographies and domains, often far from major technology and financial hubs. He was born and raised in India, took degrees in business administration and electrical engineering in the U.S. and India, and has experience investing in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Most recently, he was a partner at Providence Equity’s growth fund, where he worked on growth buyouts and minority investments in software and payments. At TCV, Gopi will focus on software and software-enabled businesses covering business applications, vertical software, digital marketplaces, and infrastructure software.

“We take as much care in adding a new partner as we do in making a new investment,” said Jake Reynolds, General Partner at TCV. “Gopi’s success springs from the same qualities that have driven TCV for nearly a quarter-century: deep domain knowledge, keen market insight, and a passionate commitment to helping entrepreneurs achieve category leadership. He also complements the firm’s broad growth-biased investment approach with expertise in software buyouts and buy-and-build investing.”

Gopi understands TCV’s approach, just as we recognize the value he has brought to his investments, including a willingness to roll up his sleeves and work side by side with management. As a citizen of the world who started his career as an engineer and data modeler, he has an innate ability to identify and partner with the next generation of category leaders and the entrepreneurs steering them.

We are thrilled to welcome Gopi to the team.

The General Partners of TCV

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The companies identified above are not necessarily representative of all TCV investments and no assumption should be made that the investments identified were or will be profitable. For a complete list of TCV investments, please visit www.tcv.com/portfolio-list/. For additional important disclaimers regarding this post, please see “Informational Purposes Only” in the Terms of Use for TCV’s website.