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 client cell safety enterprise to Finland’s F-Safe. Phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Based out of Boston in 2009, Lookout initially began out as a consumer-focused smartphone safety and knowledge backup enterprise, garnering hundreds of thousands of customers and tons of of hundreds of thousands 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 progressively prolonged its attain into the enterprise realm, notching up enterprise partnerships with expertise giants comparable to Samsung alongside the best way. A few years again, Lookout went many of the method 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 collection of safety merchandise for the buyer 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 all the remnants of its client enterprise to F-Safe — a long-established European client cybersecurity firm that sells every little thing from password administration instruments to antivirus functions.
Lookout says that with this transaction, which it expects to conclude inside the subsequent two months, its enterprise will “now evolve right into a pure-play enterprise firm,” specializing in cell endpoint safety and cloud safety. Whereas it didn’t disclose how a lot it gained for its client enterprise, it stated 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 launch. “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.”