Miami cybersecurity startup Lumu raises $8M, led by Panoramic Ventures
By Nancy Dahlberg
It’s a critical time for companies and organizations to prioritize cybersecurity as nation-state criminal groups target everything from business IP to government secrets and critical infrastructure. At the same time, these companies are grappling with a weakening economy and the hiring restraints that come with that.
That’s where the Miami-based cybersecurity startup Lumu comes in. Companies of all sizes need tools that enable their already stretched security teams to gain an accurate understanding of a potential attack in real time, enabling a swift response.
“Cyber adversaries are forcing companies of all sizes to do a better job and Lumu is the company that is helping any organization to do so,” says Lumu founder and CEO Ricardo Villadiego, in an interview with Refresh Miami. “We help cyber defenders to do a better job of identifying what could do harm to their business.”
Today, Lumu announced it has closed an $8 million investment round led by Panoramic Ventures. Participants in the round include SoftBank Group’s SB Opportunity Fund, KnowBe4 Ventures, Land Bess, a former Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks executive, and Tom Noonan, former CEO at Internet Security Systems. Lumu is also announcing a partnership with the Clearwater-based KnowBe4, the leading security awareness training platform for employees.
Including its $7.5 million round secured in March 2021 in which Lumu was one of SoftBank Group’s first investments in its $100M Miami Initiative, Lumu has now raised $15.5 million in venture capital.
In the past year, the Miami startup has seen 200% year over year growth, and its platform is used by more than 3,100 organizations, up from 1,300 in March 2021, Villadiego said. To date, the Lumu platform has analyzed more than 1 trillion metadata and detected more than 345 million adversarial contacts.
“I think we have demonstrated here that there is a growing conviction that cybersecurity requires a different operation mindset,” Villadiego said, leading companies to adopt Lumu’s Continuous Compromise Assessment model. In the past, to build the type of capabilities that Lumu enanbles for companies took months to develop, he said. “Lumu enables those capabilities in less than 30 minutes for companies. That is something the market is demanding. Now it’s time to accelerate our response to the market.”
Villadiego, born in Colombia, is a cybersecurity veteran. He previously founded and ran Easy Solutions, and Manny Medina was one of his first major backers. Prior to that, Villadiego, an engineer, held positions at IBM, Internet Security Systems and Unisys Corporation, before finding his passion in building startups.
After selling Easy Solutions, Ricardo Villadiego founded Lumu in mid-2019. Lumu’s business model hasn’t changed. The startup offers a freemium model and two premium tiers – Lumu Insights and Lumu Defender. The latter connects with the rest of a company’s cybersecurity stacks to make sure that the system self-regulates, he said.
Lumu has grown from about 30 employees last year to about 100 today. Villadiego expects to hire about 40 to 50 employees by the end of 2023.
Paul Judge, managing partner of Panoramic Ventures, said Lumu’s hypergrowth shows that companies across all verticals are realizing the value of measuring compromise within their networks and acting on this data immediately.
Said Judge, “the innovation Lumu is bringing to the market is evident and a true game-changer for cybersecurity.”
Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]
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