Brookfield Asset Management invests in IoT cybersecurity firm Armis
On Tuesday, IoT cybersecurity firm Armis announced that it has received a scaled growth equity investment from Brookfield Technology Partners, the venture investing arm of Brookfield Asset Management, the alternative assets giant that manages $575 billion in client money. Brookfield’s participation in the funding round occurs alongside existing investors,including New York-based private equity fund Insight Partners, Capital G (the independent growth fund of Alphabet, f.k.a. Google), and Canadian private equity investor Georgian Capital Partners.
Brookfield’s investment will bring Armis’s flagship product–the Armis agentless device security platform for threat detection and mitigation to IoT devices–to Brookfield-owned businesses and operating industries in more than 30 countries globally.
Investing for the exodus back to the office
The new investment brings Armis to $300 million in financing to date, and an implied valuation of $2 billion. Insight Partners will remain majority owner, and Armis will continue to operate independently under the management of its executive team, including its co-founders CEO Yevgeny Dibrov and CTO Nadir Izrael.
“It’s very exciting to have Brookfield and Georgian partner with us on this journey,” said Armis co-founder and CEO Dibrov. “Brookfield’s footprint spans far and wide, including physical infrastructure and healthcare assets, which are sectors that are increasingly turning to Armis to help them protect the exploitation of blind spots from connected device adoption. Bad actors are taking advantage of the lack of security on these devices – managed, unmanaged, IoT, IoMT, and OT – and attacks on these businesses are growing at exponential rates with severe real-life consequences.
“In addition, as covid-19 vaccinations rollout this year, our partnership with Brookfield and its massive real estate footprint of over 500 million square feet in commercial office space provides an opportunity to work with companies to ensure data and information security as they bring employees back to the office with more devices than ever before.”
Brookfield Technology Partners Managing Partner Josh Raffaelli said the investment came after a lengthy evaluation of the emerging security market for so-called agentless devices.
“Brookfield underwent a thorough yearlong industry evaluation, and it was clear that Armis was the only platform able to serve and scale globally across the vast industries in which we operate whether it be infrastructure, real estate, renewables, healthcare or telecom,” Raffaelli said. “We are very excited at the opportunity to partner with Armis at this juncture in their growth trajectory.”
The imperative
Armis cites figures from market research firm IDC that rpoject the number of connected devices at 40 billion by 2025. Many of these devices, often referred to as the Enterprise of Things, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), Manufacturing/OT, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), or Internet of Things (IoT), have little to no security defense and cannot be protected in the same manner as traditional devices, posing new hazards for organizations of all size and scale.
Armis says its agentless, enterprise-class device security platform is specifically designed to address this new threat landscape of unmanaged and IoT devices. This includes consumer devices like laptops, smartphones and smart TVs, as well as devices in real estate, infrastructure and manufacturing properties like security cameras, HVAC systems, industrial control systems, PLCs, and, increasingly, medical devices.
“Cybersecurity for the built environment is no longer optional, and the need to secure devices throughout our organization is more critical than ever before,” said Zaki Abbas, Chief Information Security Officer, Brookfield Asset Management. “One of the biggest challenges organizations face is the ability to identify and secure the devices connected across disparate business lines – you can’t protect what you don’t know about. Armis’s ability to monitor both managed and unmanaged devices across IT, IoT, IoMT and OT gives organizations a single pane of glass across all environments and mitigates their risks, as their ability to see everything enables IT teams to put the appropriate security in place to protect them from bad actors.”
Biggest growth? Health care
Armis says in the past two years, its revenue has grown more than 750 percent, while its customer roster has grown over 425 percent, even amid the broader market volatility due to covid. In fact, much of Armis’s growth is coming from demand for medical device security, where the company has been recognized for its medical device security solutions by firms including Forrester, ISG and Gartner.
“Cybersecurity is critical for any healthcare delivery organization – protecting patient information and care services from cyber-attack is the need of the hour,” said Abhishek Agarwal, Chief Information Security Officer at kidney dialysis provider Fresenius Medical Care, North America.
Agarwal said his firm uses Armis to track connected medical devices, behavior and to provide adaptive risk scoring to reduce the total cybersecurity risk associated with medical devices.
Recently, the company launched the Armis Device Knowledge Base, a cloud-based device behavior database that now actively tracks more than 500 million assets daily, up from 200 million in 2019.
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