Lookout sells its shopper cybersecurity enterprise to F-Safe and goes all-in on the enterprise
Lookout’s long-running transition to changing into an enterprise safety firm is all however full, revealing in the present day that it’s promoting its shopper cellular safety enterprise to Finland’s F-Secure. Phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Based out of Boston in 2009, Lookout originally started out as a consumer-focused smartphone security and information backup enterprise, garnering millions of users and hundreds of millions in funding from esteemed buyers together with Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Greylock, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Telekom, and Jeff Bezos.
Over the previous 10 years, Lookout has step by step prolonged its attain into the business realm, notching up enterprise partnerships with know-how giants such as Samsung along the way. A few years again, Lookout went many of the approach towards cementing its B2B credentials when it snapped up cloud-native cybersecurity startup CipherCloud, an organization centered on the rising safe entry service edge (SASE) safety phase.
Quick-forward to in the present day, and whereas Lookout nonetheless provides a set of safety merchandise for the consumer market together with antivirus software program for smartphones, it’s clear that its trajectory in recent times has been heading a lot nearer to the enterprise, which is why it’s offloading just about the entire remnants of its shopper enterprise to F-Safe — a long-established European consumer cybersecurity company that sells every thing from password administration instruments to antivirus purposes.
Lookout says that with this transaction, which it expects to conclude throughout the subsequent two months, its enterprise will “now evolve right into a pure-play enterprise firm,” specializing in cellular endpoint safety and cloud safety. Whereas it didn’t disclose how a lot it gained for its shopper enterprise, it mentioned that the proceeds will probably be be plowed again into its enterprise merchandise, alongside the $150 million in debt-financing it secured from BlackRock final summer season.
“Our success within the extremely aggressive enterprise market has compelled us to focus our product and go-to-market efforts to realize benefit,” Lookout CEO Jim Dolce famous in a press release. “By doubling down on the enterprise market, we’ll be higher positioned to capitalize on its projected hypergrowth, fueled by a rise in distant and hybrid work, a shift to cloud-based supply fashions and the transition to zero-trust architectures.”