Cybersecurity Firm Bishop Fox Nabs $75M In Funding, Eyes Channel Expansion

Cybersecurity company hopes to hire a first-ever channel chief by the end of this year, says CEO Vinnie Liu.

Vinnie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Bishop Fox

Bishop Fox Inc. has raised an additional $75 million in funding as the offensive-security company gears up for a major global expansion via the channel in coming years.

The Series B funding was led by growth-focused Carrick Capital Partner and brings its total raised to $100 million, the Tempe, Ariz.-based Bishop Fox announced on Thursday.

The 17-year-old Bishop Fox, whose Cosmos platform provides simulated cyberattacks to identify vulnerabilities in customers’ IT systems, has been on a roll of late, tripling its annual reoccurring revenues last year and growing its first quarter bookings by more than 50 percent compared to same period in 2021, the company said.

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Bishop Fox has also increased its workforce by 33 percent, to nearly 400 employees, since the beginning of the year.

Among its customers are Google, Equifax, John Deer, Sonos and Zoom.

Though much of the new funding will go towards enhancement of the firm’s core technology platform, Vinnie Liu, co-founder and CEO of Bishop Fox, said the company is also in growth mode and needs to expand.

Currently, the firm mostly sells directly to some of the world’s largest companies, such as to 25 percent of the firms on the Fortune 100 list. “We’ve been really fortunate,” Liu said of Bishop Fox’s current customer base.

But now Bishop Fox wants to broaden that customer base to include Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies – and that has to be done via the channel, said Liu.

Specifically, Liu said he wants to establish strong relationships with global management consulting firms and other channel players. “It’s a fairly new area for us,” he said.

Bishop Fox is hoping to hire a first-ever channel chief by the end of this year and build a channel team of three to ten employees, he said.

If all goes well, Liu said he’d like to see the channel account for one-third to half of the company’s total revenue. The company did not release its annual revenue number.

Liu said Bishop Fox’s longer-term goal is to go public. “It’s definitely something we’re looking at,” he told CRN.

The latest funding for Bishop Fox comes as some later-stage cybersecurity companies, such as Lacework and Cybereason, have cut their workforces and reduced their spending in order conserve cash, amid deteriorating market conditions and the drying up of the IPO market.

Liu said Bishop Fox is not in the same category as those companies, noting his firm is still in the early-stage funding and growth phases.

He noted that Bishop Fox is currently “not profitable on purpose,” preferring instead to keep improving its Cosmos platform and growing its overall customer base.

“We’re certainly at no risk of running out of money,” he said.

Beside its technology products, the company also provides education and cybersecurity training – and it’s hoping to tap into what’s expected to be a growing effort to better educate and train federal, state and local government workers about how to deal with cybersecurity threats, the company said in its press release.

As part of the Series B funding transaction, Chris Wenner , Carrick’s managing director, will join the Bishop Fox board of directors, alongside current board member Will Lin, managing director of Forgepoint Capital, the Series A lead investor.

“Bishop Fox has one of the best reputations with customers we have ever come across, and the highest quality solutions and tech-enabled services in the cybersecurity industry,” said Wenner in a statement.

“The combination of their world-class security operators, unique process, and Cosmos technology platform has enabled them to continuously improve the security posture of complex, global enterprises at scale.”