Israeli-US cybersecurity company Cybereason has announced the completion of a $120 million financing round led by SoftBank Corp., SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and Liberty Strategic Capital.
The new financing round came as a major surprise after the company has been at the center of a legal dispute with its investors, the Japanese investment giant SoftBank and the Liberty Fund of former US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The company's CEO Eric Gan, who left the company last week, until recently claimed in a lawsuit he filed against the investors that Cybereason, which in the past has raised money at a valuation of nearly $3 billion, was close to bankruptcy if it did not raise capital.
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Gan invested in Cybereason in 2015, while he was part of SoftBank. After the departure of the company's founder and CEO Lior Div in April 2023, he took his place, leading the company to raise $100 million from existing investors. Last week, Gan told "Bloomberg" that the company had a cash flow problem.
Despite the company's difficult situation and the loss of reputation it suffered in recent years due to SoftBank's aggressive moves, it merged with Trustwave last November, apparently in a stock deal without its value being disclosed. The deal left SoftBank as the main shareholder in the merged company.
Since the merger, Cybereason, which specialized initially in endpoint security, also manages cybersecurity services, threat detection and response, as well as data security for corporate information and email. It is competing in a crowded market with rival solutions from companies such as Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne.
Cybereason has fallen on hard times since was managed from Tel Aviv by its Israeli founders. In October 2021, the company raised funds at a $2.73 billion valuation but the tech crisis and an over-focus on the Japanese market at the expense of the US and other international markets led to a valuation reduction by the main investor, SoftBank. According to PitchBook, the company's valuation in September 2023 was $475 million.
Gan has been replaced as CEO by Manish Narula, until recently Cybereason's CFO. He represents investor SoftBank. Over the past few years, the company's workforce has shrunk from 1,374 people in March 2022 to less than half that today, of which about 200 are in Israel, according to LinkedIn. In 2022, research and consulting firm Gartner ranked Cybereason at the top of its endpoint security rankings, but dropped its ranking to a lower position in 2024, with only Broadcom below it.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on March 11, 2025.
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