The company intends to utilise the proceeds from the latest funding round to scale operations across all functions and regions, and increase its headcount from 150 to 300 employees by the end of 2022

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Pentera has more than 400 enterprise customers. (Credit: Darwin Laganzon from Pixabay)

Israeli cybersecurity company Pentera has raised $150m funding in Series C financing round that valued the firm at $1bn.

Led by K1 Investment Management, the funding round saw participation from Evolution Equity Partners and Insight Partners.

Awz Ventures, a Canadian-Israeli VC group, and Blackstone are the other investors who took part in the round.

Pentera launched its automated penetration testing technology three years ago and currently has more than 400 enterprise customers.

The company intends to utilise the proceeds from the latest funding round to scale operations across all functions and regions, and increase its headcount from 150 to 300 employees by the end of 2022.

Pentera CEO Amitai Ratzon said: “Pentera’s exponential growth has proven that enterprises are no longer willing to compromise for assumptions and simulations, but rather demand real-world validation of their security resilience against the latest cyber attacks.

“Pentera is excited for the partnership with K1 as they share our vision to achieve category leadership in security validation. We are especially grateful to our employees, customers, partners, and investors for sharing our passion for the revolution we bring to the cybersecurity world.”

The solutions offered by Pentera are designed to enable organisations to test with ease the integrity of all cybersecurity layers.

The company is a major player in the Automated Security Validation category. RansomwareReady and Log4Shell validation modules are the recent additions to its product portfolio.

Unveiled in June last year, RansomwareReady is a module of the Pentera platform that is designed to emulate the world’s most destructive ransomware strains.

In July last year, Pentera partnered with threat detection and response company Vectra AI to enable security teams to stay prepared to stop ransomware and advanced cyber attacks.

The new joint solution offered by the partnership allows customers to continuously validate attack preparedness and response capabilities.