Security awareness company KnowBe4 successfully debuted on the NASDAQ on Thursday, with its initial public offering bringing in more than $150 million to fund the company's international expansion and a focus on new automation and machine learning features.
The IPO highlights the continued strength of the cybersecurity market, and how investors see future innovations and potential gains in the ongoing cybersecurity training of workers and executives. While the number of data breaches has declined over the past year, attackers have increasingly adopted the more damaging attack of ransomware, which has doubled by some estimates and accounts for more than half of all serious attacks.
The trends have put companies on notice, says Stu Sjouwerman, founder and CEO of KnowBe4.
"The amount of data breaches are still going up dramatically, faster than what companies are spending on the human layer," he says. "Well-over 50% of data breaches are caused by attackers going after the human, but companies are only spending 3% of their IT security budgets on the human element."
The security awareness and training market continues to mature, growing beyond its beginnings as a way to satisfy compliance requirements. No longer are the services just about training to comply with bare-minimum phishing requirements, but are now more about creating a security culture among all employees, according to Forrester Research, a market research firm.
"We saw an evolution where a great deal of emphasis was placed on phishing, due to the extreme nature of the threat vector, and many ..
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