Eden Prairie cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf raises another $150 million

Arctic Wolf, the Eden Prairie security-operations firm that protects organizations from cyber threats, is planning more growth in Minnesota and globally following another large capital raise from private investors.

The company's latest round of funding — $150 million — includes investments from Greenwich, Conn.- based Viking Global Investors and Owl Rock, a division of publicly traded lending firm Blue Owl Capital, the company said Tuesday.

The fresh capital gives Arctic Wolf a valuation of $4.3 billion, the fourth-highest valuation for a private cybersecurity company in the U.S. based on the amount of investment dollars raised since 2019, according to investment tracker Crunchbase.

The new funding will be applied to global expansion, product development and hiring more employees. The company added almost 400 employees in the past 12 months and has plans to add 500 in the coming year, with as many as one-third of those new employees being based in Minnesota, said Nick Schneider, Arctic Wolf's president and chief revenue officer.

Currently, 267 of the firm's 938 employees are based in Minnesota.

In less than two years, Arctic Wolf has raised $410 million and has doubled both in revenue and head count. The company closed on $60 million in March of last year, followed by a $200 million capital raise in October, during which time the company announced it was moving its headquarters from Sunnyvale, Calif., to Eden Prairie.

The capital raise in October valued Arctic Wolf at $1.3 billion.

A public offering is on the horizon, although Schneider did not disclose a specific timeframe. Evolving the company's products and services will occur both organically and through acquisition, he said.

In addition to hiring in Minnesota in the past year, Arctic Wolf has made investments in its Eden Prairie campus, including building a third security operations center. That operations center, which will house several hundred people, is expected to be completed by next summer, Schneider said.

Of Arctic Wolf's 3,000 customers, the majority are in North America, but international users are growing, Schneider said. The company is establishing its European headquarters in the United Kingdom and expects to open its first European security operations center in Germany later this year.

Given an increase in consistent ransomware attacks, some that have made global headlines, Arctic Wolf is expecting more demand for its products and services, Schneider said. The global spend on information security and risk-management tech grew more than 6% in 2020 and is expected to reach $150 billion this year, according to Gartner Inc., a research and advisory firm.

"There's a myriad of different cybersecurity products that have come to market over the past few years, but the volume of incidents has only increased," Schneider said. "There's clearly an effectiveness problem with the products that are being delivered to the market, and our view is that products are one piece of the pie. It's really about marrying the products themselves, which would be our platform, with a concierge security team to deliver what is effectively a security operation to every customer that we have."