Five Companies That Came To Win This Week

For the week ending Aug. 9, CRN takes a look at the companies that brought their ‘A’ game to the channel including Abnormal Security, Fortinet, Avant, Rewst and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

The Week Ending Aug. 9

Topping this week’s Came to Win list is cybersecurity provider Abnormal Security for an impressive $250-million funding round that boosts the startup’s valuation to $5.1 billion.

Also making this week’s list are Fortinet for a strategic acquisition in the data security space and distributor Avant for its acquisition of CX Effect. MSP automation platform developer Rewst is here for its own successful round of funding. And Hewlett Packard Enterprise is here (again) for clearing one more hurdle on the road to completing its $14-billion acquisition of Juniper Networks.

Abnormal Security Raises $250M, Achieves $5.1B Valuation And Looks To IPO

AI-powered cybersecurity vendor Abnormal Security was riding high this week after closing an impressive $250 million Series D funding round that boosted the company’s valuation to $5.1 billion. The company also said it had surpassed $200 million in annual recurring revenue – more than double just one year ago.

Abnormal Security co-founder and CEO Evan Reiser told CRN that the company will use the additional financial resources to advance its cybersecurity platform, which is powered by behavioral AI Technologies, and work toward going public – possibly in the fourth quarter of next year.

Abnormal got its start in email security but has since expanded to protect collaboration and cloud platforms. The latest funding round, led by Wellington Management, brings its total funding to $546 million since its founding.

Reiser told CRN that the company is next looking to expand its AI-powered platform to protect a greater number of SaaS applications from attacks that are themselves increasingly driven by AI.

Fortinet Acquires Data Security Startup Next DLP

In a move to bolster the capabilities of its Unified SASE platform, cybersecurity tech developer Fortinet this week acquired data security startup Next DLP.

With the acquisition of Next DLP – which CRN named one of the 10 hottest cybersecurity startups of 2023 – Fortinet said it will enhance its Unified SASE (secure access service edge) offering as well as “improve its position in the standalone enterprise data loss prevention (DLP) market.”

Next DLP offers a platform for spotting insider risk while also detecting exfiltration of data and data loss, using a software agent that delivers a minimal impact to CPU performance and worker productivity.

Last fall, Next DLP announced the expansion of its Reveal Platform to cover generative AI tools including Hugging Face, Bard, Claude and several others, in addition to ChatGPT.

Fortinet CEO Ken Xie said in a news release that integrating Next DLP will “significantly strengthen our data loss prevention capabilities,” with benefits including better enablement for customers around management of insider risk.

The deal comes less than a week after Fortinet announced it had completed its acquisition of former security unicorn Lacework. Fortinet has emphasized the integration of Lacework’s cloud security capabilities into its Unified SASE offering.

Avant Acquires CX Effect To Grow Its Customer Experience, AI Services

Speaking of savvy acquisitions, distributor Avant acquired tech distributor CX Effect this week in a move that expands its sales and service opportunities around customer experience (CX) and artificial intelligence.

CX Effect has more than 40 CX and AI vendor partnerships and sales enablement capabilities that combined with Avant’s bench of sales engineers and resources create an expanded portfolio of CX and AI vendors to boost solution providers’ role of trusted advisors, Drew Lydecker, Avant co-founder and president, told CRN.

“The acquisition of CX Effect significantly expands our portfolio by incorporating over 40 new suppliers,” Lydecker told CRN in an email. “This accelerates Avant’s success as we continue to address the rapidly growing cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure and AI markets. Further, CX Effect has been expanding its offerings with solution-specific CX and AI providers for three years now, a process that involves extensive work in building channel relationships and sales enablement programs.”

“This acquisition will immediately enable our Trusted Advisor channel to pursue and win more opportunities,” Lydecker said. “Every dollar that shifts from contact center labor to technology spending represents a recurring revenue opportunity for Trusted Advisors.”

Avant plans to integrate CX’s proven CX and AI training and sales enablement capabilities into its programs and Pathfinder platform.

Rewst Secures $45 Million In New Capital Funding

Returning to the topic of successful funding efforts, MSP automation platform developer Rewst this week said it raised $45 million in a Series C capital funding round led by Sapphire Ventures.

Founder and CEO Aharon Chernin told CRN that the startup, which has recorded triple-digit growth in the past year, plans to use the additional financial resources to accelerate the pace of innovation of its robotic process automation platform as well as invest in community education and support for MSPs.

Rewst has raised $104 million since its 2020 launch – including $76 million in just the last 12 months. In the first half of 2024 the company’s annual recurring revenue grew 182 percent year over year and the number of customers grew by more than 200 percent.

Rewst has stayed ahead of the increasing demand by doubling its head count, building out its engineering, customer success, education and robotic operations center (ROC) teams to ship more features faster and better support its growing customer base. Some of the new funding will be used to continue those staffing efforts – doubling again the approximately 100 employees it has today over the next year.

With UK Approval, HPE Is Now Another Step Closer To Concluding Juniper Acquisition

Last week Hewlett Packard Enterprise made this list after getting the green light from the European Commission for its blockbuster $14-billion deal to buy Juniper Networks.

This week HPE is here again after the U.K. antitrust watchdog Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) gave its approval for the deal. “The CMA investigated and cleared the anticipated acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise of Juniper Networks,” the CMA said in a statement issued Wednesday, Aug. 7.

HPE plans to complete the acquisition by early 2025, roughly one year after announcing the deal.