Today Energize Ventures is proud to announce that we led a $15M Series B investment in Nozomi Networks, a company providing operational visibility and industrial cyber security solutions to major industrial customers worldwide. Existing investors GGV Capital, Lux Capital and Planven Investments all participated in this round as well. John Tough is joining the board of investors alongside Glenn Solomonn, Bilal Zuberi, Giovanni Canetta and the executive team.
Throughout 2017, the Energize Ventures team met with dozens of executives across the energy and industrial landscape. In those executive discussions, we learned about specific areas where utility and industrial companies expected to increase annual budgets to meet more pressing daily operating requirements. One topic that continues to arise with these executives is operational technology (“OT”) cyber security. For years, these firms have built out their IT cyber security practices while relying on asset isolation as the primary method of industrial cyber security. Today, a more digitally connected grid and industrial infrastructure requires a new form of machine learning industrial cyber security.
In our market review, it quickly became clear that Nozomi Networks is the answer for industrial and energy companies looking to enhance their industrial control systems. The Nozomi Networks team, led by Edgard Capdevielle, Andrea Caracano, and Moreno Carullo are leaders in the ICS market and bring a combination of world-class cyber security and machine learning expertise. The team also has a keen and differentiated awareness for how to best combine IT and OT parameters to accelerate adoption for their core product, SCADAGuardian. The product uses advanced machine learning to passively monitor an OT network to identify anomalous events and provide unprecedented operational visibility.
While the Nozomi Networks product is industry-leading, it is the team’s customer focus that drove home the conviction for our investment. The company has an excellent reputation working with customers to understand their specific requirements and then delivering incremental protocols and bespoke configurations in record time, enabled by the agility of Nozomi Networks’ software. Given that the cybersecurity industry can at times be more academic than customer- and revenue-driven, this is a crucial capability. Through very lean operations to-date the, Nozomi Networks team has achieved tremendous growth across Europe and North America. We are very excited about providing sufficient capital to accelerate product and customer growth for the company with this Series B investment.
Energize Ventures leveraged the forward leaning nature of Invenergy’s own security team for parts of our market review. While Invenergy helped us diligence a more forward-leaning topic, we do expect that recent news such as the TRITON ICS attack on oil & gas assets will increase broader awareness for the cyber security industry. And, with each attack, the level of interest for better industrial control systems and OT visibility will grow. We at Energize Ventures will do our part to better secure the energy and industrial industries by making commercial connections for Nozomi Networks to the Funds and Invenergy’s networks as well as our broader LP’s networks. Our goal is to ensure that Nozomi Networks grows from its current, leading market position to be synonymous with excellence in industrial cyber security and operational technology visibility.
In the digital transformation of energy, we believe that companies using technology to make energy more affordable, reliable, and secure will win. We are excited to partner with Nozomi Networks and bring their next-generation suite of solutions to ensure the security and reliability of the world’s energy and industrial infrastructure.
