Menlo Security closed a $75 million Series D funding round, bringing its total raised to about $160 million — and indicating that the money flowing into security companies isn’t stopping any time soon.

It’s also proof that Menlo Security’s take on zero-trust security works and is different from some other over-hyped products on the market, said CEO Amir Ben-Efraim.

“I understand that these days there are a lot of people raising significant rounds, but typically it’s companies experiencing one of these break-out [security technologies],” Ben-Efraim said, adding that Menlo Security’s cloud protects “millions of end users” and isolates more than 500 million websites each day. “The evidence is out there that this is working, and working for some of the world’s largest customers, so on that basis the investment community is willing to step in with big checks.”

Clients advised by JP Morgan Asset Management led the Series D round. Existing investors, including General Catalyst, Sutter Hill Ventures, Osage University Partners, American Express Ventures, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, and Engineering Capital also participated. In addition, Jonathan Ross, portfolio manager and managing director at JP Morgan Asset Management, will join the company’s board.

The vendor developed what it calls internet isolation technology. This separates an enterprise network from the public web while still allowing employees to access the internet seamlessly.

The platform removes the viewing of email attachments and web browsing from the desktop and moves it to the cloud. “When you try to reach a website, we stand up a virtual machine browser in the cloud, and the browsing session is only allowed to send visuals down to your endpoint because visuals cannot infect you,” Ben-Efraim explained. “The user experience remains native, but it’s 100% safe.”

By isolating internet content in the cloud with a zero-trust approach, users are protected from malware, ransomware, and phishing attacks, thus eliminating the most prolific sources of breaches, according to Ben-Efraim.

Ben-Efraim says Menlo Security has “hundreds of customers,” including seven of the 10 largest banks, four of the five largest credit-card issuers, and some of the largest energy and transportation companies in the world. The U.S. Department of Defense’s IT combat support agency, known as the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), is also a customer.

The company claims that, over a recent six-month period, its platform protected a Global 2000 enterprise against thousands of phishing and malware attacks that were not detected by the customer’s other security defenses. The customer experienced:

• 1,089 emailed phishing links that evaded other security defenses and were delivered and clicked by employees
• 8,541 known malicious websites were not blocked by other security defenses and were visited by employees

These attacks bypassed the customer’s other defenses, but Menlo Security says its Isolation Secure Web Gateway prevented malware installation, theft of end-user credentials, and the exfiltration of corporate data.

“This ability to eliminate malware from web and email is really a game changer for a lot of customers,” Ben-Efraim said. “We call that zero-trust internet where you can go anywhere on the internet and be safe. It’s about taking that vision and making sure we get bigger and bigger.”

He says the Series D funding will be used to expand Menlo Security’s global sales team. This includes doubling the U.S. sales team in the next 12 months, adding to its Asia-Pacific sales teams, and expanding to Europe (the company currently has a presence in the United Kingdom).

Ben-Efraim won’t disclose the company’s valuation. But he said Menlo Security doubled its annual recurring revenue in 2018, compared to 2017, and “we expect 2019 over 2018 to be about that as well. We’ve been growing at that clip for a number of years now.”

He doesn’t plan to raise any additional late-stage funding: “The next funding round for us would be an IPO.” But that’s still a few years away, he added. “We’ve still got some expansion to do.”