Coro Co-Founder On New $100M Funding Round, Surging Channel Growth

The ‘all-in-one’ cybersecurity vendor for SMB and mid-market customers plans to invest heavily in its partner program in connection with the new fundraise, Co-Founder Dror Liwer tells CRN.

Fast-growing cybersecurity vendor Coro plans to invest heavily in its channel program in connection with its newly announced $100 million funding round, a top executive told CRN.

The provider of an “all-in-one” security platform for SMB and mid-market customers expects to unveil a revamped partner program in coming months with numerous upgrades for solution and service providers, according to Dror Liwer, co-founder and CMO of Coro.

Along with the partner program update, the new funding will support the introduction of additional product offerings and continued hiring — helping to maintain a rapid growth pace for Coro, Liwer said. Revenue has more than tripled during each of the past five years and for 2024, the vendor is expecting between 200 percent and 300 percent revenue growth, he said.

The expansion ultimately is enabled by the fact that Coro uniquely offers an “end-to-end, modular cybersecurity platform for the mid-market,” Liwer said. “Frankly, we are the only company that does it.”

Coro’s platform includes endpoint security, email protection and SASE (secure access service edge) offerings, and future areas of expansion could include security awareness training and simulation capabilities, he said.

The $100 million Series D round, announced Thursday, means the company has raised a total of $255 million over the past 24 months, Coro said.

The valuation of the company associated with the new funding was not disclosed. However, Liwer said that Coro’s valuation is higher than it was in connection with the vendor’s prior round, though not yet at the $1 billion “unicorn” level. The company’s valuation connected to its April 2023 funding was reportedly $575 million.

The Series D funding was led by One Peak and also included investments from Energy Impact Partners and Balderton Capital.

What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Liwer.

What are Coro’s biggest differentiators at this stage?

We were built from the ground up to target the mid-market and small businesses. We're not an enterprise product, like CrowdStrike, that is trying to now shove an enterprise product down a mid-market or a small business throat. We're not a consumer product that is trying to shove their product down a small business throat.

The second differentiator is that we are a platform. We were built from the ground up as a platform because we believe that the mid-market can't really ingest multiple different products and work through them.

My understanding is that CrowdStrike was also built as a platform from the start, would you agree with that?

To some degree — but when you use Proofpoint as your email engine, are you really a platform? We have email [protection] ourselves, we have SASE ourselves, we have data governance ourselves. So it's really integrated into the same platform.

What have you been seeing in terms of channel growth?

We are a channel-first company — 70 percent of our revenue comes from the channel. We expect that to grow dramatically in 2024 and 2025.

We've removed a lot of the risk [for partners] from starting to offer end-to-end cybersecurity to the mid-market and small businesses, with a lot of really interesting things that we've done internally — including what we call modular managed services. We have a managed services team, and you can decide which module you want us to manage. So you can buy our modules either managed or unmanaged. This is not to compete with our channel partners. On the contrary, this is to enable them.

If I'm a channel partner today, and I don't sell EDR [endpoint detection and response] and I don't know how to sell EDR … until you train your team, we will run it on your behalf. And then when your team is trained and ready, turn us off. No hard feelings. We charge $1 per user per month for managed service, so clearly it's not a revenue center for us. It's an enablement center for us.

What sort of updates are coming in your new channel program?

[This will be] a very significant announcement about an upgrade to our partner program, and the tools and the programs that we're going to offer our partners.

We're putting together a new PRM [partner relationship management] system that will much more effectively enable our partners to sell and market the product to their customer base -- offloading a lot of the hard work from them to our platform. We have very large partners, but we also have very small partners. We see them as one of our most valuable resources, so we want to support them with as much automation as possible.

We're also going to announce some tiering, which will allow for even more margin for our largest partners, which is not something we've done officially up until now. And we're going to announce the European channel program, where we're going to move aggressively.

What can you say about hiring plans?

We have just over 360 employees right now. We expect to be at about 500 by the end of the year. We're growing extremely fast, and a lot of this is in our channel team. Right now we have about 65 people on the channel team. That will probably be about 100 or 110 [by the end of the year].