Awake Security Acquired By Arista Networks: Simplifying Network Security In A Complex World
By: Enrique Salem
Tags: Mergers And Acquisitions, Portfolio News, Network Security, Cybersecurity

When I started working in the security industry 30 years ago — and all through my decade-long tenure as CEO of Symantec — a corporate network was simple, easy to manage, and secure. Today, the network is anything but simple. With cloud computing, the proliferation of IoT, and an increasingly remote workforce connecting through mobile and personal devices, the network has become a vast and amorphous entity requiring sophisticated security protocols to protect corporate data from breaches, leaks, and hacks. Security professionals are faced with the daunting task of monitoring vast amounts of data, processes, and users flowing over complex networks encompassing campus-based and virtual data centers, SaaS and on-premise software, and private and public clouds.

To try to stay ahead of hackers, most security professionals use SIEM platforms to get alerted to potential threats and breaches. The problem is, they’ve become buried under an avalanche of daily alerts, constantly reacting to potential threats that often turn out to be false alarms. They spend so much time responding to alerts they have little time to hunt for more serious or nefarious potential threats, leading to many of the massive security breaches we’ve seen at large companies over the past few years.

Back in 2015, I was having coffee with Michael Callahan, who had previously worked for me at AskJeeves, and he told me about a company he had just co-founded called Awake. His co-founders were a group of phenomenal security and networking industry veterans, Keith Amidon, Gary Golomb, and Debabrata Dash, each with a different skill set. The Awake team had a crystal-clear vision: create an AI-enabled analytics platform that could help security analysts spot and respond to real threats, instead of wasting time responding to mostly inaccurate alerts. They planned to solve a pressing problem facing just about every security team on the planet.

Following Awake’s progress over the next two years, I watched as the founding team worked closely with security professionals across small and large companies to understand their worst pain points, all the while improving their product to help overcome these obstacles. I was impressed by the founders’ vision and desire to simplify the security operations center, spurring Bain Capital Ventures to lead Awake’s Series B in 2017 and then participate in its subsequent Series C earlier this year. Awake’s network detection and response (NDR) platform is now the world’s most advanced network traffic analysis platform, combining AI with human expertise to enable security professionals quickly find and remediate sophisticated cyber-attacks that would otherwise go undetected by traditional security solutions.

Today, as Arista announces its acquisition of Awake, I’m thrilled for both parties. It’s a perfect match to simplify network security and offer threat detection. Arista is the leader in cognitive cloud networking solutions for large data center and campus environments. By integrating Awake’s NDR platform into its cognitive network infrastructure, Arista can now offer its customers threat detection as a proactive tool rather than a reactive alert system. Awake will become an integral part of Arista’s security ecosystem that already leverages technology from Forescout, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, VMware, and Zscaler. Both Arista and Awake share the vision that security analysts should be able to quickly spot malicious intent amongst seemingly normal activity, using nimble tools to do their job more effectively.

I’ve had the good fortune to work closely with the founding team at Awake since I joined the board in 2017, and since 2018, have had the privilege to work alongside Awake’s passionate CEO Rahul Kashyap. He is the kind of CEO who is tireless and sets a high bar. As a security professional himself, Rahul deeply understands what vexes security analysts and what keeps CISOs up at night. Once he sets his mind to a goal, he doesn’t give up until he achieves it. For example, he asked the board who the most experienced and visionary security professionals were and someone mentioned Kevin Mandia, CEO of FireEye. Rahul contacted Kevin and asked him to join the Awake board. At first Kevin said he was too busy, but after many long walks with Rahul, Kevin eventually agreed and has been a tremendous asset to the board ever since.

Working hand-in-hand with the Awake team as they’ve continued to refine their vision to protect countless customers networks has been an incredible journey. The company grew annual recurring revenue (ARR) by nearly 700 percent and doubled its employee headcount in just the past year alone. Since BCV invested in 2017, Awake has quickly evolved into the market leader for network detection and response, shadow IT, remote worker and contractor security, digital network packet forensics, and threat hunting. And they achieved their ultimate goal: making security analysts’ jobs infinitely easier.

I’m thrilled for Awake to join Jayshree Ullal and the Arista family, and grateful for the opportunity to work alongside an amazing group of co-investors and board members: Asheem Chandna, Sarah Guo, Karthik Subramanian, Kevin Mandia, Juan Muldoon, Ankur Prakash, and Katie Gray. On behalf of BCV, we can’t wait to see what this partnership brings to customers in the years to come.