Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is acquiring Israeli cybersecurity startup Axis Security for $500 million. HPE is making the acquisition through its subsidiary Aruba Networks, a competitor of Axis.
HPE, which was founded in 2015 as part of the splitting of the Hewlett-Packard company, has a market cap of around $20 billion.
Axis has raised a total of $100 million to date, netting $50 million in its most recent funding round, a Series C in March 2021. The round was led by new investor Spark Capital, which had previously invested in Twitter, Tumblr, and Slack. Existing investors, including Gil Ra’anan’s Cyberstarts that has backed the company since its founding, Canaan Partners, and Ten Eleven Ventures, also participated in the round. The company completed a $32 million Series B funding round in September 2020.
Axis was founded at the end of 2018 by Dor Knafo, who serves as its CEO and previously worked at Fireglass, which was acquired by Symantec, and Gil Azrielant, who serves as its CTO. It is headquartered in San Mateo, California with its research and development center based in Tel Aviv. The company employs around 120 people.
Axis’ Application Access Cloud is a purpose-built cloud-based solution that simplifies application access, using a Zero Trust platform. It enables multiple users using any remote device to connect to organizational software simply, securely, and within minutes, without requiring changes to the network or the software. It reduces the requirements of network-based security associated with VPNs which can be complex, agent-based, slow to deploy, and hard to manage, especially when providing access to third-party supply chain partners, vendors, contractors, and remote employees at scale.
