Feeling the Love

It’s been truly remarkable to see the evolution of the security industry since starting here at Security Systems News more than five years ago. Not just within technology, which has exploded with the convergence of physical and cybersecurity, and with cloud, machine learning, AI and robotics gaining traction, but also from a diversity and inclusion perspective, as the wide breadth of voices leading conversations today is refreshing and long overdue.

What’s even cooler is high-profile executives and companies outside of the security industry are taking notice, getting behind and investing in security companies. Case in point is SSN “40 under 40” Class of 2019 Alumnus Ryan Schonfeld’s new business, HiveWatch, which just secured an additional $20 million in growth funding led by former Twitter CEO & COO Dick Costolo and Adam Bain of 01A, with participation from Lachy Groom, Elad Gil, and Penny Jar Capital (a fund anchored by Stephen Curry), joining early insiders Crosscut Ventures, Freestyle Capital, and SaaS Ventures.

As Schonfeld told SSN, the funding is a “testament to the value and future” of smart physical security.

“Our investors at some of the fastest growing companies in history saw HiveWatch as a solution to the problem of scale for their own physical security programs,” Schonfeld said. ‘That’s significant in itself, since they’ve lived the challenges of scaling security and ran into the common issues of disconnected, antiquated systems that don’t provide valuable insights. When security components — IT, physical, and cyber — correlate, businesses can increase operational efficiency.”

Another recent example is Viakoo securing $10 million in Series A funding led by Shasta Ventures, a San Francisco, Silicon Valley-based investment company that was one of two early investors in the Series A round for Nest Labs in September 2010. We all know how well that turned out! Shasta Ventures joins existing investors Stanley Black & Decker, PivotNorth Capital, and BlueFog Capital.

As Viakoo CEO Bud Broomhead told SSN, the emergence of IoT throughout all industries, not just security, creates an incredible ecosystem of devices and systems that must be secured.

"With support from our investors, Viakoo is entering its next chapter of growth to achieve its vision of helping customers defend their IoT attack surfaces across the enterprise," he said. "We’ve already gained significant traction with large-scale customers, including cities, healthcare, education and large data centers. With our latest investment, we are now in an excellent position to extend our leadership in IoT device vulnerability remediation.”

And this is just the past week of reporting here at SSN! Good things to come as the security industry continues to feel the love!