ICS Security Firm Dragos Reaches $1.7B Valuation in Latest Funding Round

ICS security vendor Dragos has reached a nearly $2 billion valuation in the wake of a $200 million Series D funding round that is led by Koch Disruptive Technologies and BlackRock and includes major industrial companies such as Emerson and Rockwell Automation.

The funding round follows a $110 million Series C in December 2020 led by major global energy, manufacturing, and oil and gas company investors. Dragos now has a $1.7 billion valuation.

Some of its previous investors joined the latest round, including Koch, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Allegis Cyber, Canaan, DataTribe, Energy Impact Partners, National Grid Partners, and Schweitzer Engineering Labs. The Series D round will go toward Dragos' continued global expansion in security for the industrial sector, including electric, oil and gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, water, and manufacturing.

Dragos' funding and valuation underscores a red-hot ICS security market that has accelerated amid the pandemic's subsequent work-from-home shift and ongoing digitization of industrial operations, as well as in the wake of high-profile cyberattacks including the ransomware attack that forced gas pipeline company Colonial Pipeline to temporarily shut down its pipeline.

Robert M. Lee, co-founder and CEO of Dragos, says industrial organizations really started to take OT cybersecurity seriously after the 2015 cyberattack that knocked out the power in Western Ukraine. "I think we're seeing 2015 Ukraine catch up with us," Lee says. Power companies began to realize "that could happen here," he notes.

Now ICS security is getting high-level business support. "My conversations were always with CISOs and CIOs, but in the last year, it's all been CEO and [the board]," he says. "There's been an awakening there."