Security operations unicorn Arctic Wolf’s initial public offering (IPO) plan remains on track, and it may use the proceeds to buy cloud security vendors.

The company plans to go public mid to late 2022, Arctic Wolf President and CEO Nick Schneider told SDxCentral. “We've been pretty public that our intent is to go public this year," he said. "We'll do it when the market is right and when the company's right.”

Arctic Wolf closed a $150 million Series F funding round last summer, which boosted its valuation to $4.3 billion.

By targeting an IPO this year, Arctic Wolf joins several other cybersecurity startups that will likely make their public debut in 2022.

An IPO generally brings a large infusion of cash and resources, and the company plans to use that to boost sales, expand into more markets, and expand its products and capabilities. This could happen organically, or through mergers and acquisitions in the areas of incident response, threat intel, endpoint protection, and cloud security, Schneider said. 

“We've spent a lot of time internally on what it would require for us to do what we think is right in the cloud security space, and certainly we've looked at cloud security vendors as potential M&A targets,” he said. 

Arctic Wolf developed a cloud-native security operations platform that provides several managed security services including threat detection and response, vulnerability and risk, cloud infrastructure and services monitoring, and security awareness training.

Built on an open extended detection and response (XDR) architecture, the vendor’s platform ingests and analyzes more than 1.6 trillion security events and 1.3 petabytes of data each week from more than 1 million licensed users across 2,300 global customers, the company claims.

In addition, the company recently appointed Dan Schiappa as its chief product officer to further scale its platform. Schiappa most recently served as chief product officer at Sophos, and he has held product leadership and executive roles for RSA and Microsoft.

Arctic Wolf's traditional strength has been in the small and midsize business market, but in recent years it has grown its large-enterprise business.

“The market has fragmented so much so you have all these siloed markets within cybersecurity,” Schneider said. This leaves large organizations “trying to manage sometimes 100 plus security tools within their environment.”

To assist with the management, Arctic Wolf’s platform unifies different cybersecurity technologies, systems, and tools into a centralized view to provide actionable intelligence, remediate specific incidents, and monitor the entire network 24/7.

In addition, the vendor recently rolled out a feature called Log Search to its managed detection and response services to help customers find security and operational data, changes, and activities more efficiently. 

Schneider expects the company will add more capabilities and modules for its large-enterprise business soon.