Security company Palo Alto Networks is forming a US $20 million security venture fund to provide early stage capital investments to fuel development of its applications for the next-generation security platform.
Palo Alto says the fund will be aimed at seed, early and growth-stage security companies with a cloud-based application approach.
According to Palo Alto these companies can accelerate their routes to market for their respective technology by developing cloud-based applications built on the Palo Alto Networks platform and the new Palo Alto Networks Application Framework, easily engaging the tens of thousands of Palo Alto Networks customer deployments.
Chad Kinzelberg, senior vice president, business and corporate development, Palo Alto Networks, says the fund expects to collaborate with Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital to identify and evaluate innovative security applications for potential co-investment.
{loadposition peter}“This new fund will build upon our reputation for developing innovative, next-generation security technologies and demonstrate the excellent momentum that we have achieved with our ecosystem of security partners.
“It represents an essential part of our mission to help organisations prevent cyber breaches by inspiring and accelerating a groundswell of security innovation in a model that can be easily accessed and deployed by customer organisations.”
According to Asheem Chandna, partner, Greylock Partners Palo Alto Networks’ new security application development model represents an “important milestone for the security industry, and holds huge potential for customers, entrepreneurs and developers”.
“We are excited to team with Palo Alto Networks to help entrepreneurs accelerate development in cloud-based applications, to serve a rapidly growing customer base that includes tens of thousands of the world’s most important customers.”
Announcement of the security venture fund coincides with a cloud-based framework that extends the capabilities of the Palo Alto next-generation security platform which the company says will allow customer organisations to rapidly consume and implement a variety of innovative cloud-based security applications from any provider, large or small.
According to Palo Alto, the new framework represents a “game-changing evolution” of its security platform, disrupting the consumption model for organisations to rapidly access, evaluate and adopt cutting-edge security technologies with the Palo Alto Networks infrastructure they already have.
“It will extend the power of the platform to more rapidly achieve automated, consistent and scalable breach prevention capabilities, all delivered from the cloud,” Palo Alto says.