FireEye, Cyber Specialist, Brings Total Cash Raised Above $100M

FireEye, the 9-year-old cybersecurity specialty company now run by veteran technology executive Dave DeWalt, closed an additional round of financing that raised $50 million, bringing the cumulative total to $101 million.

The Milpitas, Calif., company said it would use the extra funds for corporate expansion and has no immediate plans for an initial public offering. DeWalt said FireEye hadn’t used a loophole in last year’s Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act to file quietly for an IPO.

Given the sector and the nature of its blue-chip investors, FireEye could see an IPO soon or else get snapped up by a larger company in need of security software.

DeWalt, 47, was CEO of then-troubled McAfee when it was sold to Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:INTC), the No. 1 chipmaker, in 2010, and only was recruited to FireEye in late November, when founding CEO Ashar Aziz stepped aside to become chief technology officer and vice chairman.

Previously, DeWalt, 45, had been executive VP of EMC Corp. (NYSE:EMC), the No. 1 maker of storage products that had previously acquired security companies including RSA Security, as well as CEO of Documentum, which was acquired by EMC in 2003.

FireEye, whose Malware Protection System is sold to more than 1,000 enterprises to combat cyberattackers, said the latest funding came from Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), SVB Financial’s (NASDAQ:SIVB) Silicon Valley Bank, Sequoia Capital, Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR) and Norwest Venture Partners.

The company also said 2012 bookings exceeded $100 million, double the 2011 figure. It didn’t say if operations are profitable. DeWalt previously valued the company above $1 billion.

FireEye says its products do more than detect and react to attacks by outsiders by protecting e-mail, providing a protection cloud and anticipating threats.

As well, FireEye said it named six veteran executives, including alumni of EMC and McAfee, to senior positions. They include Ken Gonzalez, as VP for corporate development, who had most recently been chief strategy officer at Avast Software, and Manish Gupta, a VP of Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) as senior VP for products.

Besides big security specialists such as Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ:SYMC) and Check Point Software Technologies (NASDAQ:CHKP), the top computer services giants headed by Hewlett-Packard Co. and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) have both acquired a handful of pioneering private security companies since 2010.

IBM used the 2011 acquisition of private Q1 Labs, of Waltham, Mass., as the focus of establishing a major security software and services organization, while HP used the 2010 purchase of ArcSight, of Cupertino, Calif., for $1.6 billion, to augment its competing units.

In the fourth quarter, U.S. government agencies, major financial institutions including Citicorp (NYSE:C) and enterprises including Saudi Aramco said they had been subject to cyberattacks.