Devo Technology, the newly minted cloud-native logging and security analytics unicorn, today announced a $250 million Series E funding round that pushed its valuation to $1.5 billion. The funding also marks the first anniversary for its CEO Marc van Zadelhoff, who has led the company to double its revenue, customers, and employee headcount.

Van Zadelhoff has been in cybersecurity for around 24 years. Prior to joining Devo, he worked for IBM for over a decade and co-founded its security division. As the general manager for IBM Security, he managed more than 1,000 people when he left.

Van Zadelhoff brought his management experience and a large network of customers to Devo. In his first year as CEO, he helped the company grow to more than 400 employees across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, and he doubled its customer base, which includes thousands of organizations around the world such as H&R Block, Manulife, and AMEX Global Business Travel.

“I think you're going to see us continuing to double in size over the next year, year and a half, as our revenue grew 100% in the last year as well,” Van Zadelhoff said. “We think that within two years we'll be at the size to be able to go IPO if not earlier.”

Devo’s latest funding round led by TCV brings its total capital raised to more than $400 million. The vendor plans to use the funding to build out its cybersecurity roadmap, public sector presence, and APAC region expansion, Van Zadelhoff said. 

He added that Devo has also recruited a number of professionals from CrowdStrike, IBM Security, and Microsoft to boost its cybersecurity innovations and offerings. It built a team for the Australia and New Zealand region and plans to expand to Singapore and other parts of APAC. 

Devo offers a security analytics platform that ingests data from every machine in an organization's system including operating systems and SAP applications, and then stores and analyzes the records to provide security and IT operation insights. Particularly, as a massive data ingestion platform, it helps detect, analyze, and display cyberattack alerts, database access abnormalities, and compliance issues, Van Zadelhoff said.

“We're like the beating heart of the security operations center where analysts are looking to defend against hacks and insiders and compliance issues, and we are the dashboard for that in the cybersecurity space,” he explained. 

Van Zadelhoff names Elastic, Splunk, Sumo Logic, and HPE ArcSight as Devo's top competitors. “We would differentiate by the fact that we are a cloud-native contemporary solution," he said. "We have really strong machine learning algorithms in the platform, and then we have a very strong security application on top of it.” 

Additionally, Devo has more efficient compression ingestion so it can handle larger amounts of data in the cloud and offer 10 times the ingestion speed but up to half the infrastructure cost of its competitors, he added. 

Thanks to the artificial intelligence (AI) analytics, the platform also can eliminate false positive security alerts, and “take millions of events down to just a handful of alerts” for customers, Van Zadelhoff said.  “Devo is serving as the only credible [go to] in the cloud for large customers needing sophisticated security analytics and enterprise logging at scale.”