Corelight Accelerated by Venture Funding

Welcome to the Corelight blog!

I’m kicking off this series with an update about the company, but future posts will be a lot more technical.  You can expect information and musings from Vern Paxson, Robin Sommer, Seth Hall, Johanna Amann, Christian Kreibich, Vince Stoffer, and others on our team.

Many of you know this – but for those who don’t, Corelight was founded by the creators of open-source Bro and leaders in the open-source community.  We have two goals: 1) to build incredibly effective security solutions on a foundation of Bro, and 2) to channel money and human cycles into the open-source project, helping it grow and thrive.  

To date we’ve been bootstrapping the company.  Even though bootstrapping taught us a lot about focus, it hasn’t helped support the Bro community as much as we’d hoped. Yes, Corelight made a significant donation to the Bro Foundation last year – and we were very happy to do it. But Robin and Seth’s cycles (and Johanna’s too) have been redirected more than we’d like by the process of getting this company off the ground.

Late last year we decided to look for venture funding, and we have just announced a $9.2M round of investment. Our primary investor is Accel Partners, which has expertise in the art of nurturing and sustaining ‘open’ business models. Accel has invested in Facebook, Docker, Slack, Cloudera, and many other great companies – both open-source and proprietary. Our new board member Eric Wolford brings operational experience, deep roots in product management, and wisdom.  
I’m delighted to announce that Steve McCanne has become an investor in Corelight as well, and an independent board member.  Steve was founding CTO of Riverbed Technology and CTO of Inktomi.  And here’s a coincidence: Steve was creating ‘libpcap’ in the mid-1990s at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory while sharing an office with fellow grad student Vern Paxson, who was creating Bro at the same time. So our Series A funding reunites two networking legends, who are working on the same team again.

Since closing the funding round, we’ve relocated to San Francisco and gotten busy hiring – attracting senior leaders who will help us serve our customers better. A good example is our advisor and acting CMO Alan Saldich, previously VP Marketing for Cloudera, and a person who truly understands the dynamics of open-source companies. We’re also busy adding new capabilities to our flagship Corelight Sensor, a turn-key appliance with features and integrations large enterprises need.  We’ll have more to say about our product vision in future posts.

OK, that’s it for the company update!
In the future, this blog will shine a spotlight on Bro. Whether it’s used to validate or disprove alerts from other tools, piece together complex security incidents, or support threat hunting teams, Bro’s powerful and actionable data is at the center of the world’s most capable security operations.