Emerges From Stealth to Eliminate Threat of Malware, Adds $25 Million in Series B Funding

Industry’s first Isolation Platform already trusted by Fortune 500 companies, now ready for global market

Menlo Security launched from stealth today to unveil the industry’s first Isolation Platform, a new technology that eliminates the threat of malware from key attack vectors, including Web and email, and transforms the current model for preventative security. The company also announced today the closing of a $25 million Series B funding round led by new investor Sutter Hill Ventures and joined by existing investors General Catalyst, Osage University Partners and Engineering Capital to support the company’s rapid growth.

Businesses spent more than $70 billion on cyber security tools in 2014, and collectively lost nearly $400 billion as a result of cyber crime. With nearly 1 million new pieces of malware released daily, existing security technologies built on the premise of determining whether content is good or bad – such as signature-based malware detection, secure web gateways, sandboxes and virtual execution tools  – are no longer capable of mitigating the cyber security threat.

Built by a team of industry experts in security, cloud and virtualization, alongside renowned academics from the University of California, Berkeley, the Menlo Security Isolation Platform is the only isolation security solution that requires no endpoint software and can be deployed at scale to completely eliminate the threat of malware from Web traffic, Web-based documents and email.

“What Menlo Security is doing with isolation is revolutionary for the security industry and unprecedented for organizations in search of tangible, effective threat prevention,” said David Giambruno, senior vice president and chief information officer of Tribune Media. “While detection solutions can’t prevent modern malware, and early isolation solutions are too hindering to the end user, Menlo Security has ‘cracked the code’ and found a way to preserve user experience while exponentially reducing risk and enabling the security and IT teams to change operating paradigms.”

Today, even the most trusted websites can be compromised, delivering zero-day malware to unsuspecting users. Rather than try to distinguish legitimate content from malware, the Menlo Security Isolation Platform isolates and executes all Web content in the cloud and away from the endpoint. The solution uses patent-pending, clientless rendering technology, Adaptive Clientless Rendering™ (ACR), to deliver a non-executable, malware-free copy of the user’s session to their native browser, creating a transparent user experience that is 100 percent safe every time.

“Organizations and individuals should be able to interact online without the fear of being compromised,” said Amir Ben-Efraim, co-founder and CEO of Menlo Security. “By focusing on ease of deployment and a seamless user experience, the team at Menlo Security has reinvented isolation as a highly usable and scalable front line of defense against malware.”

According to Neil McDonald of Gartner, isolation via “virtualization and containment strategies will become a common element of a defense-in-depth protection strategy for enterprise systems, reaching 20 percent adoption by 2016 from nearly no widespread adoption in 2014.”*

“The problem with all of our current security solutions is that they rely on identifying malicious traffic and, while this approach works for a period of time, eventually the bad guys always figure out how to circumvent detection,” said Jack Miller, head of information protection for Automobile Club of Southern California. “Menlo Security’s approach is very different in that they ‘isolate’ all content so it doesn’t ever reach the desktop. It’s kind of like viewing and interacting with the Internet through a bullet proof window.  Without any loss of functionality, you are protected against all malware. Quite frankly, I haven’t been this excited about a new tool in many years.”

Prior to emerging from stealth, Menlo Security in November 2014 announced $10.5 million in Series A funding to reinvent security. The new round of financing brings the total company funding to $35.5 million. Additionally, Stefan Dyckerhoff, managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures, is joining the Menlo Security’s board of directors.

The Menlo Security Isolation Platform is available now as a public cloud-based service or as a virtual appliance for on-premise deployment. The Platform requires no software on the endpoint and is compatible with any hardware (desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone), any OS (Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android) and any browser (IE, Chrome, Safari, FireFox).

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Menlo Security

*Gartner, “Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Technologies for Information Security in 2014,” Neil MacDonald, 24 February 2014

About Menlo Security

Menlo Security protects organizations from cyber attack by eliminating the threat of malware. Menlo Security’s Isolation Platform isolates all Web content in the cloud, enabling users to safely interact with websites, links and documents online without compromising security. Its Adaptive Clientless Rendering™ (ACR) technology deploys within minutes and can easily scale to provide comprehensive protection across organizations of any size without impacting the user experience. Menlo Security is trusted by some of the world’s largest enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies and financial services institutions. The company was founded by security industry veterans, in collaboration with acclaimed researchers from the University of California, Berkeley. Backed by General Catalyst, Sutter Hill Ventures and Osage University Partners, Menlo Security is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. For more information, visit HERE.