Skyhigh Networks

Skyhigh Networks was founded in 2011 (with the company publicly launching and closing its Series A financing in the March-April 2012 timeframe) by Rajiv Gupta (CEO), Sekhar Sarukkai (VP of Engineering), and Kaushik Narayan (CTO). Gupta was a repeat enterprise-software entrepreneur: he holds a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Caltech, and prior to Skyhigh he had been GM of HP's E-speak division, founder/CEO of Confluent Software and Securent (both sold), and VP/GM of Cisco's Policy Management Business Unit (Cisco acquired Securent in 2007). Sarukkai holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University Bloomington and had been a Fellow/Chief Scientist roles at prior companies; Narayan holds degrees from Bharati Vidyapeeth and BITS Pilani. The company set out to solve the 'shadow IT' problem created by employees adopting unsanctioned SaaS/cloud applications, building a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) platform that combined a continuously updated registry (rating thousands of cloud services against ~30 risk criteria, using Hadoop-based big-data analysis) with reverse-proxy and API-based enforcement, cloud DLP, and anomaly/threat detection for sanctioned apps like Salesforce, Box, and Office 365.

Greylock Partners, via partner Asheem Chandna, was Skyhigh's founding/Series A investor starting around April 2012 (Chandna's board seat, per his own Crunchbase record, ran 'Apr 2012 - Jan 2018,' i.e., through the close of the McAfee deal). Skyhigh then raised a $20 million Series B in May 2013 led by Sequoia Capital (partner Aaref Hilaly, who later also sat on Skyhigh's board) with existing investor Greylock Partners participating. In June 2014 the company raised a $40 million Series C co-led by Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, with Salesforce as a strategic participant; at that point the company reported 200+ customers and 362% revenue growth since 2013, bringing total funding to over $66 million. A Series D of roughly $40 million followed (reported around early 2016), led by Thomvest Ventures (partner Umesh Padval), bringing total funding to just over $106 million per Crunchbase/TechCrunch reporting at the time of the McAfee deal (the $66M-post-C plus a $40M Series D reconciles with the reported $106M+ total). Other board members over the company's life included Bill Burns (later Chief Trust Officer at Informatica) in addition to Chandna (Greylock) and Hilaly (Sequoia).

On November 27, 2017, McAfee announced a definitive agreement to acquire Skyhigh Networks; the deal closed in January 2018. Financial terms were not officially disclosed, but PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch pegged Skyhigh's last private valuation at approximately $400 million, and this figure (sometimes rounded up to $400-500 million in press commentary) is the most commonly cited price range for the deal, though it should be treated as an estimate rather than a confirmed transaction price. This was McAfee's first acquisition since its April 2017 spinout/carve-out from Intel (in partnership with TPG), at which point McAfee itself had been valued at $4.2 billion. Rajiv Gupta became SVP/head of McAfee's Cloud Business Unit; Kaushik Narayan became CTO of that unit; both departed McAfee around January 2021 to found new ventures (Gupta founded Axiamatic; Narayan co-founded a stealth startup and Axiamatic). Sekhar Sarukkai became a Fellow/Chief Scientist at McAfee before later returning to academia (UC Berkeley) and founding ChatSee.

Business model

B2B enterprise SaaS security vendor selling a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) platform via subscription/license to large enterprises, deployed via reverse proxy, API connectors, and log analysis to monitor and secure use of third-party cloud/SaaS applications.

Enterprise software subscription/license fees (SaaS security platform), typically sold per-user/per-seat to Global 2000 enterprises via direct sales and channel partners.