Insight Partners will acquire IoT security startup Armis for $1.1 billion. The deal marks the first cybersecurity acquisition of 2020, and it’s the largest-ever enterprise IoT security software acquisition, according to the companies.

Armis will continue to operate independently and be managed by its two co-founders, CEO Yevgeny Dibrov and CTO Nadir Izrael, along with its executive team. Insight and Armis expect the transaction to close in February.

The deal comes as the number of connected devices explodes — Gartner expects 25 billion of these by 2021 — and they represent the fastest-growing attack landscape for organizations globally.

“Security is one of the biggest factors limiting IoT expansion,” Bill Curtis, resident analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. “IoT security has to be built-in, not added on.”

But, according to Armis’ research, by 2021 up to 90% of all devices will be unmanaged and unsecured.

Dibrov and Izrael founded the security unicorn in 2015. Two years later it launched its agentless IoT security platform.

The product integrates with an enterprise’s existing IT infrastructure and provides visibility into and management over devices both on and off the corporate network. Additionally, its cloud-based Device Knowledgebase monitors more than 80 million devices worldwide, and it feeds this data to the platform to provide device visibility. It also analyzes and classifies devices and their behavior to identify risks or attacks, and to secure information and systems.

Last April Armis raised $65 million in Series C funding, bringing its total to $112 million. At the time, Izrael said Armis saw 700% growth in annual revenue in 2018 year including multi-million-dollar contracts with enterprises.

The startup claims more than 25% of the Fortune 100 deploy its technology, and its customers include Mondelēz, Sysco Foods, Allergan, and Samsung Research America.

“One of the biggest challenges keeping CIOs and CISOs up at night is how to secure the unmanaged devices proliferating through their businesses, from manufacturing floors to hospital rooms, from airports to boardrooms,” said Izrael in a statement about the acquisition. “The exponential growth of Armis to date illustrates just how critical securing unmanaged devices is for businesses. With the backing of Insight, we will continue to expand our world-class technology to help identify devices, track their behavior and respond to the threats that target them.”

Armis has offices in Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv.

New York-based venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners, meanwhile, opened an office in Tel Aviv in October. This is its first facility outside of the U.S., according to Crunch Base.