After 10 years, a McLean, Virginia company is moving up to the next level with its first institutional investment — to the tune of over $100 million.
Global Guardian, which was founded in 2012, is a travel assistance company for corporations and families around the world that places an emphasis on security. The company helps with anything from illness and hacking to more extreme situations like national disasters, kidnapping and more. It just raised over $100 million from Align Capital Partners to help with scaling and increased global presence.
Ben Gerow, an account manager with Pinkston who served as Global Guardian’s press liaison, declined to specify an amount for the raise beyond the aforementioned more than $100 million.
This round is a crucial step for Global Guardian, Buckner said, because the company started off with just $600,000 in cash. Since then, it’s operated only on investments from private individuals, while still growing 41% to 100% year-over-year and doubling in size three times. In 2017, it also acquired Birmingham, Alabama’s Air Ambulance Card.
Growing with zero debt, Buckner said, has been key in showing how the company can develop on its own — and what it could do with a nine-figure investment.
“We reached a point where we’ve proven the model with differential and it can grow,” Buckner told Technical.ly. “We’ve proven we can grow organically.”
The 253-person company works with both large, Fortune 1000 companies and families on work trips or vacations, said CEO Dale Buckner. Global Guardian tracks flights and hotels and can keep track of employees in major disruptive events, like the hurricane expected in Florida this week. Global Guardian can geofence all the buildings a company owns, detect who might be in danger in an extreme event and send out email and text alerts in its app.
Global Guardian can also automate surveillance and access controls so doors, locks and more can be accessed remotely from anywhere in the world. For someone in cyber danger after getting hacked or clicking an unsafe link, Global Guardian can “quarantine” the device, shutting it down and wiping the memory, in under two minutes.
With this round, Buckner said the company plans to do one of three acquisitions spanning both the US and abroad. Although the company operates in 134 countries, he said that operations are very US-centric.
Buckner said that the company will continue to expand in the US — he noted that there are plenty of domestic dangers that folks need protection for— but he is hoping to scale Global Guardian internationally. Most of its clients are currently based in the US, and he’d love to work with more companies and families worldwide, as well as open international operation centers.
“We’re going to be able to take on more scale with more capabilities as we continue to grow these different platforms — whether it’s on the tech side or the physical side, with the teams around the world, and growing those teams to continue to scale up for the additional business, additional client base,” Buckner said.
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