San Francisco-based security startup Corelight, which specialises in network traffic analysis, has raised $150 million in Series E funding. The investment was led by its first capital investor Accel alongside strategic investment from Cisco Investments and CrowdStrike Falcon Fund.
This funding will accelerate Corelight’s AI-driven security innovation, cloud-native security capabilities, and data fusion partnerships with leading cybersecurity platforms to deliver transformative capabilities for SOC analysts and incident response teams.
Widely used network security tech
Corelight was founded by Gregory Bell and Vern Paxson. The software that Paxson developed at Berkeley Lab in the 1990s, Zeek has now been adopted by Microsoft to bolster its security capabilities, and ships with every version of Windows. The tool from the internet’s early days keeps Microsoft’s users secure while supporting the open-source paradigm. It helps security teams have better visibility into their networks and respond more effectively to attacks.
It transforms network and cloud activity into evidence that security teams use to proactively hunt for threats, accelerate response to incidents, gain complete network visibility, and create powerful analytics. Corelight’s global customers include Fortune 500 companies, major government agencies, and large universities.
Open NDR platform
Corelight disrupts attacks with its open network detection and response (NDR) platform. It improves detection coverage, accelerates incident response, increases SOC efficiency, and gains complete visibility over your network.
It streamlines operations with a fully integrated solution. open NDR combines dynamic network detection, AI, intrusion detection (IDS), network security monitoring (NSM), and packet capture (PCAP) in a single security tool that’s powered by proprietary and open-source technologies. This is touted to provide the most complete network visibility, powerful detections, and threat-hunting capabilities, and accelerate investigation.
It is the NDR platform of choice for the elite cybersecurity services teams at CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and the Black Hat NOC at Black Hat events. Corelight’s technology and partnerships have become the industry’s fastest-growing, scaled NDR platform, with over 40% YoY ARR growth and 300% YoY growth in the company’s AI and SaaS-driven NDR solutions.
“Corelight uses the network to provide ground truth evidence of adversarial movement, and the use case for that data is unbounded,” said Brian Dye, CEO of Corelight. “Customers and partners are broadly adopting Corelight to drive advances in AI-driven security operations, cloud visibility and detection, and next-generation SIEM platforms. We are excited to collaborate with CrowdStrike, Cisco, and Accel as we continue to innovate and serve the needs of our mutual customers.”
“What stood out about Corelight since the early days was its unusually strong enterprise traction, battle-hardened, open-source technology, and its delighted customers,” said Arun Mathew, partner at Accel. “Corelight is remarkably well positioned to modernize legacy technologies and deepen technology partnerships with the most significant cybersecurity organizations and platforms around the globe.”
“Driving visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments helps customers solve key security challenges and amplify the power of their cybersecurity posture,” added Janey Hoe, vice president, Cisco Investments.
“Next-Gen SIEM will transform how security analysts detect, investigate, and respond to attacks,” said Gur Talpaz, vice president of corporate development at CrowdStrike and head of Falcon Fund. “Third-party data from Corelight’s Open NDR Platform adds valuable context to the rich telemetry of the Falcon platform. We’re excited to increase our investment in Corelight, extending our partnership.”
