Lookout sells its consumer cybersecurity business to F-Secure for $223M and goes all-in on the enterprise

Lookout’s long-running transition to turning into an enterprise safety firm is all however full, revealing as we speak that it’s promoting its shopper cellular safety enterprise to Finland’s F-Secure in a deal valued at around $223 million.

Based out of San Francisco in 2009, Lookout initially began as a consumer-focused smartphone safety and knowledge backup enterprise, garnering hundreds of thousands of customers and tons of of hundreds of thousands in funding from esteemed traders, together with Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Greylock, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Telekom and Jeff Bezos.

Over the previous 10 years, Lookout has regularly prolonged its attain into the enterprise realm, notching up enterprise partnerships with expertise giants similar to Samsung alongside the way in which. A few years again, Lookout went many of the manner towards cementing its B2B credentials when it snapped up cloud-native cybersecurity startup CipherCloud, an organization centered on the rising safe entry service edge (SASE) safety phase.

Quick-forward to as we speak, and whereas Lookout nonetheless presents a collection of safety merchandise for the consumer market, together with antivirus software program for smartphones, it’s clear that its trajectory lately has been heading a lot nearer to the enterprise, which is why it’s offloading just about the entire remnants of its shopper enterprise to F-Safe — a long-established European shopper cybersecurity firm that sells every part from password administration instruments to antivirus purposes.

A ‘pure-play enterprise firm’

Lookout says that with this transaction, which it expects to conclude inside the subsequent two months, its enterprise will “now evolve right into a pure-play enterprise firm,” specializing in cloud and cellular endpoint safety. The corporate mentioned that the proceeds from the sale can be be plowed again into its enterprise merchandise, alongside the $150 million in debt-financing it secured from BlackRock final summer time.

“Our success within the extremely aggressive enterprise market has compelled us to focus our product and go-to-market efforts to achieve benefit,” Lookout CEO Jim Dolce famous in a press release. “By doubling down on the enterprise market, we’ll be higher positioned to capitalize on its projected hypergrowth, fueled by a rise in distant and hybrid work, a shift to cloud-based supply fashions and the transition to zero-trust architectures.”

For F-Safe, the deal offers it a stronger foothold within the U.S. market particularly, in addition to bolstering its present shopper software program lineup with a collection of pretty comparable merchandise.

“According to F-Safe technique, we’re looking for development each organically and thru acquisitions,” F-Safe CEO Timo Laaksonen mentioned in a press release. “The acquisition of Lookout shopper enterprise unit is a big step in creating our enterprise in the USA. With a complementary software program product portfolio and robust competence in creating cellular merchandise, Lookout shopper enterprise unit is an ideal match for F-Safe.”

*This text was up to date with a deal valuation and extra remark from F-Safe.