Lookout sells its consumer cybersecurity small business to F-Safe for $223M and goes all-in on the organization
Doris Ratliff
3 min read
Lookout’s prolonged-functioning changeover to becoming an business security corporation is all but finish, revealing nowadays that it is providing its purchaser cell security organization to Finland’s F-Protected in a deal valued at all around $223 million.
Launched out of San Francisco in 2009, Lookout originally commenced as a purchaser-focused smartphone protection and info backup business enterprise, garnering tens of millions of buyers and hundreds of hundreds of thousands in funding from esteemed investors, like Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Greylock, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Telekom and Jeff Bezos.
In excess of the earlier 10 several years, Lookout has gradually extended its arrive at into the small business realm, notching up enterprise partnerships with technologies giants these as Samsung along the way. A pair of yrs back, Lookout went most of the way toward cementing its B2B qualifications when it snapped up cloud-native cybersecurity startup CipherCloud, a corporation centered on the growing secure accessibility services edge (SASE) security section.
Quickly-forward to today, and even though Lookout still offers a suite of security products for the purchaser current market, which include antivirus software for smartphones, it is clear that its trajectory in current many years has been heading a great deal nearer to the business, which is why it really is offloading fairly a lot all of the remnants of its consumer business to F-Protected — a long-recognized European shopper cybersecurity organization that sells everything from password administration instruments to antivirus purposes.
A ‘pure-play organization company’
Lookout says that with this transaction, which it expects to conclude inside the subsequent two months, its organization will “now evolve into a pure-enjoy business firm,” focusing on cloud and cellular endpoint safety. The company reported that the proceeds from the sale will be be plowed again into its organization goods, along with the $150 million in financial debt-financing it secured from BlackRock very last summer time.
“Our results in the extremely aggressive business sector has compelled us to concentration our product or service and go-to-market efforts to attain edge,” Lookout CEO Jim Dolce noted in a push release. “By doubling down on the organization sector, we’ll be greater positioned to capitalize on its projected hypergrowth, fueled by an maximize in distant and hybrid do the job, a change to cloud-dependent shipping and delivery versions and the changeover to zero-have faith in architectures.”
For F-Protected, the offer provides it a stronger foothold in the U.S. current market specially, as very well as bolstering its current client software program lineup with a suite of rather related products.
“In line with F-Protected tactic, we are trying to find growth both of those organically and by acquisitions,” F-Safe CEO Timo Laaksonen reported in a statement. “The acquisition of Lookout customer organization device is a substantial step in acquiring our small business in the United States. With a complementary software package product or service portfolio and potent competence in establishing mobile items, Lookout client small business unit is a perfect healthy for F-Protected.”
*This article was current with a offer valuation and additional remark from F-Safe.
