Stratum8 Secures $10M

With the need for proactive security solutions growing more critical, enterprises like Stratum8 are showing up on the radar screens of many venture capitalists. To that end, the company announced last week that it had closed its Series B round at an oversubscribed $10 million. It had set a $2 million goal last October, but could have raised $20 million if it had chosen to, the company claims. With the new money, Stratum8 has now raised $14 million in two rounds.

“Security, of course, is of interest to everyone in today’s world,” says Stratum8 CEO Bob Walters. “Seventy-five percent of the hacks that come against a Web site occur at the application level as opposed to the network level. The reason for that is hackers choose the path of least resistance.”

Stratum8’s signature application protection system (APS) is intended to act as a first line of defense to prevent would-be hackers from ever reaching a company’s servers and databases, thus eliminating the biggest source of downtime, fraud, and data theft within an enterprise.

Walters says Stratum8, a pre-revenue company, will not seek additional financing for at least two years. “If we can execute according to plan, we won’t need to, because we have a fully funded plan,” he adds.

The first release of its APS product, currently in beta testing, will be shipped in Q2 of this year.

“Application-level security has become a burning issue for businesses as the trends toward browser-based applications and inter-company applications prevail,” says Sharon Wienbar, director of BA Venture Partners, which co-led the round with New Enterprise Associates.

Robyn Kurdek can be contacted at: Robyn Kurdek