PerimeterX Raises $57M For Geographic, Vertical Growth

‘Our investors deeply believe in our vision of protecting the modern web apps that fuel today’s digital businesses with a single platform that works across hybrid edge-based infrastructure,’ says PerimeterX CEO Omri Iluz in a statement.

Application security vendor PerimeterX has raised $57 million to expand its reach beyond the retail e-commerce vertical and strengthen its presence in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company said the funding round led by AllianceBernstein will allow it to move into new industries such as financial services where it’s seeing strong customer interest. The funding comes after two of PerimeterX’s top bot management competitors—Distil Networks and Shape Security—were sold to Imperva and F5 Networks, respectively, in recent years.

“Our investors deeply believe in our vision of protecting the modern web apps that fuel today’s digital businesses with a single platform that works across hybrid edge-based infrastructure,” PerimeterX CEO Omri Iluz said in a statement. “This latest round of growth financing is a testament to the uniqueness of our vision in the industry.”

[Related: Application Security Vendor PerimeterX Debuts Partner Program]

PerimeterX was founded in 2014, employs 195 people and has raised more than $144 million in outside funding, according to LinkedIn. Prior to the latest funding, PerimeterX most recently raised $57 million in a 2019 Series C round led by Scale Venture Partners. PerimeterX executives weren’t immediately available for additional comment on the funding round.

The company was ranked No. 49 nationwide on the 2020 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 with revenue growth of 3,637 percent between its 2016 fiscal year and its 2019 fiscal year. PerimeterX grew its customer base by 50 logos in the company’s most recent fiscal year, which ended Jan. 31, by adding some of the top brands in retail e-commerce as well as financial services, according to the company.

“We see global market opportunities for PerimeterX solutions growing at a rapid pace and gaining strong traction across businesses experiencing an accelerated pace of digital transformation,” AllianceBernstein Managing Director Abhishek Sud said in a statement. “We are confident that additional funding will help the company accelerate its innovation and maintain its leadership position.”

PerimeterX rolled out its first partner program in August in hopes of boosting the share of business flowing through the channel from less than 25 percent at the time to 45 percent by Jan. 30, 2021. Even without a formal program, PerimeterX had already increased the number of channel partners it works with from three to 15 since David Brown joined the company in January 2020 as chief revenue officer.

The PerimeterX Partner Program has two tiers, and Brown expects that 90 percent of the company’s solution providers will be at the Elite level since the lower Authorized tier is intended primarily for one-off transactions. Elite partners can expect margins of 25 percent, Brown told CRN in August 2020, while Authorized partners should receive margins of 15 percent.

A key element of the new partner program will be MDF, which Brown said will be co-funded at a certain percentage of a solution provider’s expected revenue. The money can be used on programs such as cold-calling campaigns that leverage the vendor’s resources and personnel as well as joint branding and customer events, Brown said at the time.

From a product perspective, the company said it has extended its capabilities with enhanced blocking for PerimeterX Code Defender to reduce the risk of client-side data breaches. PerimeterX said it also added protection for account takeover attacks, a new verification to give customers choices beyond visual CAPTCHA, and a unified user dashboard to proactively manage new and emerging threats.

PerimeterX said it protected more than $100 million in e-commerce revenue in 2020, processing more than 2 billion login requests every day. Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, the company said it protected more than $12 billion in e-commerce revenue and processed a record 93 billion requests.