Skycure

Skycure operated in the mobile threat defense market, providing a security platform for enterprises to protect employee mobile devices. Founded in 2012 by cybersecurity veterans Adi Sharabani (CEO) and Yair Amit (CTO), the company established a dual presence in Israel and Palo Alto, California. Both founders brought significant experience from prior roles at companies like IBM (via the acquisition of Watchfire), where they led application security research and development, directly informing Skycure's focus on mobile vulnerabilities.

The company's trajectory was marked by several successful funding rounds, accumulating a total of $27.5 million. This began with a $3 million seed round in November 2012, followed by an $8 million Series A in March 2015, and a $16.5 million Series B in July 2016. Key investors included Pitango Venture Capital, Shasta Ventures, Foundation Capital, and New York Life. This financial backing enabled significant growth, and in July 2017, the cybersecurity firm Symantec announced its acquisition of Skycure for a figure reported to be between $275 million and $280 million. The acquisition was a strategic move by Symantec to bolster its endpoint protection capabilities, particularly for iOS and Android devices, and integrate Skycure's technology into its Symantec Endpoint Protection and Norton Antivirus product lines.

Skycure's business model centered on offering its Mobile Threat Defense platform to enterprise clients, including those in finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. The platform was designed to address the security challenges of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environments. Its core product was a cloud-based solution that used a layered, predictive approach to security. This system leveraged crowd-sourced threat intelligence gathered from millions of devices globally, combined with on-device and server-side analysis using AI and machine learning. It was engineered to proactively detect and defend against a wide array of threats, including malware, network-based attacks, and OS or application vulnerabilities, without impacting device performance or user privacy. Key features included the Mobile App Reputation Service (MARS) for on-demand app analysis and a Threat Connector SDK for developers to embed security checks into their own applications.

Keywords: mobile threat defense, cybersecurity, endpoint security, BYOD security, mobile application security, network threat protection, vulnerability management, cloud-based security, Symantec acquisition, malware detection