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 information backup enterprise, garnering hundreds of thousands of customers and a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands in funding from esteemed traders 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 akin to Samsung alongside the best way. A few years again, Lookout went a lot of the means towards cementing its B2B credentials when it snapped up cloud-native cybersecurity startup CipherCloud, an organization targeted on the rising safe entry service edge (SASE) safety section.
Quick-forward to in the present day, and whereas Lookout nonetheless presents a set of safety merchandise for the buyer market together with antivirus software program for smartphones, it’s clear that its trajectory lately has been heading a lot nearer to the enterprise, which is why it’s offloading just about the entire remnants of its client enterprise to F-Safe — a long-established European client cybersecurity firm that sells the whole lot from password administration instruments to antivirus functions.
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 cell endpoint safety and cloud safety. Whereas it didn’t disclose how a lot it gained for its client enterprise, it mentioned that the proceeds shall be be plowed again into its enterprise merchandise, alongside the $150 million in debt-financing it secured from BlackRock final summer time.
“Our success within the extremely aggressive enterprise market has compelled us to focus our product and go-to-market efforts to achieve 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.”