Venture capitalIID raises $8 million to scale shared cyberintelligence offering

Tacoma, Washington-based IID, developer of shared cyberintelligence for Internet security, the other day announced it has raised $8 million in Series A funding from Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP). IID said it will use the investment to accommodate growing demand for its cyberintelligence collaboration platform, ActiveTrust, which is selectively available today. ActiveTrust enables enterprises and government agencies to combat the rising frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks by sharing cyber incident data in real time. IID notes that the funding is the first ever institutional investment for the company, which has sixty-five employees.

“This financing is important in helping IID scale and we’re enthusiastic about partnering with the BVP team, which brings unrivaled expertise founding and funding dozens of cloud-based security pioneers, such as VeriSign, Postini and LifeLock,” said IID co-founder and CEO Lars Harvey. “I’m extremely proud of the steady growth that has spanned nearly two decades at IID, and it’s exciting to impact how Fortune 1000 companies and large government agencies share threat intelligence moving forward.”

IID notes that despite the growing danger posed by cybercrime, information vital to stemming the tide is fragmented across the Internet today. Pockets of data about threat activity are siloed within the repositories of individual enterprises, government organizations, vendor networks, and research institutions. IID says that its ActiveTrust platform solves the problem by offering a threat intelligence solution which automatically aggregates, validates, and exchanges actionable threat data across thousands of contributing sources, enabling organizations to power their existing security infrastructure with more robust intelligence feeds. This collaborative approach means enterprises and government agencies can increase the scope, quality, and timeliness of their cybersecurity efforts, while freeing up valuable human resources.

IID itself is not new to the realm of cybersecurity. The company has detected and mitigated cyberthreats for the Fortune 500 and leading government agencies since 1996, when the company was founded. Leveraging its ties within the cybersecurity community, IID began rolling out its ActiveTrust platform in early 2013.

“Heeding the President’s call on the private and public sectors to share cyber threat intelligence, BVP set out to find and fund the best team and technology to enable safe, real-time collaboration,” explained VeriSign founder and partner at Bessemer Venture Partners David Cowan. “With so many mega-enterprises and federal agencies joining ActiveTrust, it was clear to us that IID has already developed the most important security intelligence exchange on the planet.”

“Despite all of the recent advancements in online security, it is mind-boggling that threat intelligence sharing is stuck in the ‘90s — conducted primarily by email, and limited to peer and industry groups,” said IID co-founder, president, and CTO Rod Rasmussen. “With our threat sharing platform, we are automating at scale what IID has been doing for years — collecting, analyzing and feeding data into enterprises’ wide array of security tools — and providing a social network for enterprises to collaborate against the latest threats.”

A sneak peek at ActiveTrust can be found here.

IID say it was advised throughout the transaction by Seattle-based investment bank Evolution Capital Advisors.