CISCO to enhance its Generative portfolio with Armorblox

Cisco Systems Inc. said today it will acquire California-based cybersecurity startup SentinelOne-Backed Armorblox Inc, to Bring Generative AI to Its Portfolio by helping to protect email, cloud and office applications and enterprise communication systems are powered by natural language understanding (NLU) technology, which enables human-computer interaction through text or speech.

News of this acquisition comes shortly after Cisco announced buying cloud network security firm Valtix and cloud security company Lightspin for a reported $200-250 million. As per the source, the deal to close by the end of its fourth fiscal quarter.

Armorblox's predictive and generative artificial intelligence to help customers better understand and interact with security control points, said Cisco Security Chief Product Officer Raj Chopra. He praised the Silicon Valley-based startup for pioneering the use of large language models and natural language understanding in cybersecurity  .

Armorblox was founded in July 2017, employs 126 people and has raised $46.5 million in four rounds of outside funding. The company most recently closed a round led by SentinelOne's venture capital arm in September 2022. IT-Harvest estimates that Armorblox has annual revenue of $11.4 million, or roughly $90,000 per employee. Armorblox has 79 workers in the United States and 22 in India, IT-Harvest found.

Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close by the end of July, weren't disclosed, and Cisco declined to make an executive available for additional comment. IT-Harvest estimates that Armorblox is worth between $71 million and $97 million based on available funding and revenue data. Through this acquisition though, we see many exciting broad security use cases and possibilities to unlock, says, Raj Chopra, chief product officer, Cisco Security.

Armorblox's leadership team has experience at Netskope, StackRox, ThoughtSpot and Duo Security, which was bought by Cisco for $2.35 billion in fall 2018. CEO DJ Sampath led StackRox's engineering, Chief Product Officer Anand Raghavan led product management at ThoughtSpot, and General Counsel Mandy Legal served as Duo's head of legal for nearly six years, including when the firm was part of Cisco.

Once the acquisition closes, Armorblox will join Cisco's security business group and bring generative AI experiences to the company's security portfolio. Valtix also will join Cisco's security team while Lightspin will join the company's emerging technologies and incubation business, which focuses on cloud-native and cloud security technologies.

Chopra said Armorblox's capabilities can help with everything from enhanced attack prediction to rapid threat detection and efficient policy enforcement. Armorblox today uses natural language understanding to stop business email compromise and targeted phishing attacks, protect sensitive PII and PCI data, and automate remediation of user-reported email threats, according to IT-Harvest.

Armorblox is used by more than 58,000 organizations, including technology companies such as SentinelOne, Intermedia and ConnectWise; higher education institutions such as Caltech and Hudson Valley Community College; municipalities such as San Jose and Palo Alto, California; and retailers such as Albertsons. The company said it has threat protection, URL protection, data loss prevention and security operations products.