FireEye Scores $50M Funding, Beefs Up Executive Team

The Milpitas, Calif.-based antimalware company said the funding came from new and existing investors, including Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, Juniper Networks and Silicon Valley Bank. The company said the additional funding would support international expansion and further investment in research and development.

FireEye said it had over $100 million in bookings and over 100-percent bookings growth in 2012. The company grew its partner and customer base to more than 1,000 organizations.

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The new funding brings the company's total amount raised to over $100 million.

FireEye specializes in an antimalware platform that doesn't use traditional signatures to detect malicious code. The technology is broken down into Web and email protection, and it is designed to detect anomalous activity, helping it identify malware exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities and targeted attacks. The company introduced a File Malware Protection System last year that it says can prevent malicious code from spreading laterally into central data stores. The appliances analyze file shares and detect malware hidden in common file types.

Dave DeWalt, who served as president, CEO and director of McAfee, Inc., was appointed CEO of FireEye in November.

FireEye also announced the appointment of six key executives on Thursday, including Ken Gonzalez as vice president of corporate development; Manish Gupta as senior vice president of products; Tony Kolish as senior vice president of customer services; Sridhar Jayanthi as vice president, managing director and head of India operations; Barbara Massa as vice president of human resources; and Dawn Song, as engineering fellow.

"I am confident that we have the right team in place as FireEye continues to expand its product portfolio, unearth groundbreaking research from the lab and continue its international expansion," Dave DeWalt, FireEye chairman and CEO said in a statement.

Gonzalez, formerly chief strategy officer at AVAST Software, has 15 years of experience in business development, corporate development and strategy, having held similar roles at McAfee and Siebel Systems/Oracle. Gupta, formerly vice president of product management and marketing in Cisco's Security Technology Business Unit, brings 14 years of experience in product management and product marketing, having held similar positions at McAfee/Intel, Redback Networks and iPolicy Networks.

Kolish, formerly senior vice president of customer service at EMC, brings over 20 years of experience in services and support from roles at Documentum, Idiom, Segue Software and Softbridge. Jayanthi was formerly the head of McAfee's largest research and development team as the managing director for McAfee India operations. Massa brings over 22 years of human resources expertise gained from roles at McAfee, EMC, Documentum and Cadence Design Systems.

Song, a professor on leave from UC Berkeley and founder of Ensighta Security, Inc., has been a leading researcher and professor in computer security for over 10 years.

PUBLISHED JAN. 10, 2013