Symantec Acquires Israel’s Luminate Security For Reported $200M

The US-based, top global cybersecurity firm Symantec announced the acquisition this week of Luminate Security, an Israeli startup that developed a software-as-a-service platform focused on hybrid environments.

The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed but the Israeli press reported a sum of about $200 million.

Luminate Security was founded in 2017 by CEO Ofer Smadari, CTO Leonid Belkind and CPO Eldad Livni. It emerged from stealth mode last March to announce the completion of a $14 million funding round, and with production-grade paying customers, including international financial, technology, and consumer services enterprises.

Its solutions allows users to connect from “any device, anywhere in the world to corporate applications, on-premises and in the cloud, while all other corporate resources are cloaked without granting access to the entire network. This prevents any lateral movements to other network resources while eliminating the risk of network-based attacks.”

Symantec said in a statement that Luminate’s Secure Access Cloud™ technology, natively constructed for today’s cloud-oriented, perimeter-less world, will “further extend[…] the power of Symantec’s Integrated Cyber Defense Platform to users as they access workloads and applications regardless of where those workloads are deployed or what infrastructure they are accessed through.”

“Luminate incorporated into Symantec’s Integrated Cyber Defense puts us at the forefront of security in the cloud era,” said Greg Clark, president and CEO, Symantec.

“Secure and private access is a cornerstone of cyber defense. We are excited to partner with the Luminate team and look forward to rapid delivery of this unique capability to our customers and continuing to provide quantifiable value to their cloud journey,” he added.

“As corporate applications continue to move to the cloud, IT organizations need innovative approaches to address the complexity and security challenges of providing users anywhere, anytime access,” said Art Gilliland, EVP and GM Enterprise Products, Symantec. “Luminate Security’s agentless, cloud-delivered service solves these problems and adds a powerful Software Defined Perimeter capability to our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform.”

Smadari said: “As a partner, our integrations with Symantec were successful in reducing complexity and increasing security for joint customers. With this next step, we look forward to fully integrating across the entire portfolio and delivering even more innovation to offer complete security for the Cloud Generation.

Cyber powerhouse

Israel has long been recognized as a cybersecurity powerhouse, with the country’s cybersecurity companies and startups drawing some 20 percent of the overall cyber investments worldwide in 2018, second only to the US.

Over the course of 2018, Israeli cybersecurity companies raised over $1 billion equity investment in 117 funding rounds, setting a new record and marking a 47 percent increase from 2017, according to new report on Israel’s cyber sector published last month by Start-Up Nation Central (SNC).

Notable exits for 2018 included the acquisition of Dome9 Security by Check Point for a reported $179 million, and that of SECDO by Palo Alto Networks for a reported $100 million.

There were also significant initiatives and collaborations in the cybersecurity industry in 2018, including the establishment of a new $85 million fund by cybersecurity think tank and foundry Team8,  backed by Walmart, Softbank, Scotiabank, Barclays, and Airbus, among others; and the partnership between the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), Tel Aviv startup network SOSA, and Israeli VC Jerusalem Venture Partners to launch cybersecurity hubs in New York City.

In 2019, Israel’s cybersecurity leaders are looking at challenges such as skill shortage, securing the critical infrastructure sector, identity theft and synthetic identity schemes, IoT, and data privacy.

The SNC report noted that the data protection and privacy subsector was the fastest growing subsector in cybsersecurity.