Threat intel firm Recorded Future sells for $780 million
Insight Partners has purchased a majority share in Boston-based threat intelligence company Recorded Future for $780 million in cash, the highest ever price for a threat intel firm.
Why it matters: Recorded Future co-founder and CEO Christopher Ahlberg told Axios that his company's 10-year growth proves how vital threat intel firms — which analyze technical and human-sourced data to provide personalized actionable insights — are to the cybersecurity marketplace.
"We’ve proven that threat intelligence gets a room of its own. This acquisition proves that."— Christopher Ahlberg
Context: Recorded Future had gone through 5 previous rounds of funding totaling $58 million, with Insight as the lead investor in the Series E round.
- Recorded Future offers a machine learning-based software solution to sift through threat information as well as a research team analyzing different actors.
- Gartner estimates that by 2022, 20% of large enterprises will use threat intelligence to augment other security products.
Details: Ahlberg doesn't see much change to Recorded Future as a stand-alone product. "We'll be doing the same thing, just more of it," he said. "We could have been purchased by a larger security firm and vanished into it."