Tanium: Starting From The End(point)

IVP is excited to welcome Tanium to its portfolio. What does Tanium do in plain English? Tanium makes it radically easier and faster for systems and security personnel to manage (i.e. install new software or deploy a patch) and protect (i.e. detect malware or respond to an attack) endpoints. If this sounds important, it’s because it is. The team spent five years building a system that doesn’t slow down even as it scales rapidly and globally. IT is empowered through Tanium to have 15-second visibility and control over every endpoint across their network.

The security landscape is notoriously crowded and it is often difficult for buyers to ascertain effectiveness and return-on-investment (ROI) from any given tool, making sales cycles phenomenally challenging. Tanium is different. Its approach to security is differentiated from the competition, has an immediate ROI and is being adopted by the world’s largest organizations extraordinarily quickly. Tanium’s platform “looks” more like a simple systems management tool than a powerful security platform, but looks can be deceiving. By beginning with the premise that Tanium needs to protect one million or more endpoints, not just a local computer, Tanium is simultaneously both a systems management and security solution. Other aspects of Tanium that impressed us include:

• Tanium is One of the Fastest Growing Security Companies at Scale We’ve Ever Seen. Tanium has already reached substantial scale, yet it is still growing incredibly quickly. It is one of the fastest growing security companies at scale we’ve ever seen at IVP. It is also one of the fastest growing subscription-based model companies at scale we’ve ever seen. Growth and profitability are often at odds, yet Tanium has been meaningfully cash flow positive through its growth.
• Demonstrated Customer Delight. Tanium’s underlying technology is truly differentiated and customers notice. The company can count more than half of the Fortune 100 as customers today, despite a direct sales effort that is still relatively recent. One Fortune 100 CTO we spoke with called Tanium’s linear chain architecture, which can perform tasks up to 10,000 times faster than the competition, “game changing.” CXOs rarely compliment software (especially security and IT systems management software) as superlatively as they do Tanium. This true technical differentiation results in winning bake offs, speeding up enterprise sales cycles, landing eight digit software contracts and zero customer churn.
• Large Total Addressable Market. Tanium’s solution sits at the intersection of two markets: IT systems management and security. Tanium uses its systems management capabilities (which includes patch management, software distribution, asset inventory and asset utilization among others) as the tip of the spear to deploy its security solution (which includes threat detection, incident response, vulnerability assessment and configuration compliance among others) across entire enterprises on day one, whether that means a thousand or a million endpoints. Tanium is winning the largest organizations as customers and being deployed on all of their applicable endpoints.
• A Truly Natural Technology Platform and Company. The Tanium Endpoint Platform is truly a natural platform for deploying a wide and deep array of capabilities in systems management, security and beyond. Tanium’s library of modules for systems management and security is growing every quarter. This means CXOs can reduce the number of endpoint agents they have and manage their endpoints from a single console.
• Visionary Team / Outstanding Co-investors. Tanium’s founders, David and Orion Hindawi, are experienced and successful founders, having built BigFix previously, with an expansive vision for the future. Like many of the great founders we’ve worked with, they did not let the past define their strong views of what the future should and would look like post the inception of Tanium. We also are thrilled to be working again with our friends at Andreessen Horowitz, who we’ve partnered with at other leading Enterprise companies including Github, Pindrop Security, Slack and Zenefits. We’re also excited to be co-investing with TPG and T. Rowe Price, two exceptional firms. We’re thrilled to be working with a management team and co-investor group that is building a category-defining and unique company.

Somesh Dash is a General Partner and Tom Loverro is a Vice President at IVP.