For the third time in the last month, a Waterloo-based unicorn tech company has announced a massive raise and valuation. Arctic Wolf, the cybersecurity innovator, has announced a $150 million Series F round that has raised its valuation to $4.3 billion.
With this oversubscribed funding round, the company will continue to expand its operations worldwide, bring new products to market and accelerate its current growth. Arctic Wolf is currently experiencing 100% growth in year-over-year annual recurring revenue and 438% year-over-year annual recurring revenue growth in large enterprise customers.
This news comes less than a year after the company became a unicorn with a $200 million Series E raise last October and hot on the heels of big raises from other Waterloo companies, including a $260 million raise/$7 billion valuation for Faire and a $375 million raise/$4 billion valuation for ApplyBoard. Arctic Wolf has now raised nearly $500 million.
“The valuation we received during this funding round is not only a testament to our enormous success in establishing Arctic Wolf as the leader in Security Operations, but also speaks to the explosive global demand we are seeing from organizations looking to protect their hybrid work environments, drive secure cloud adoption and formulate an actionable strategy to end cyber risk,” says Brian NeSmith, Chief Executive Officer at Arctic Wolf.
Despite having an American headquarters, Arctic Wolf is very much a Waterloo company. They’ve had an office in our community since the beginning and it continues to be the company’s primary engineering hub. Following this news, Arctic Wolf expects to hire an additional 150 new employees in research and development, security operations and other support positions in the next year.
" Our co-founder is from Waterloo, our entire R&D team is in Waterloo and our largest office by headcount is in Waterloo. It may not say Waterloo on our corporate letterhead, but the region has been a core part of our success. "
Dan Deeth
Head of Communication, Arctic Wolf
This success is driven, in part, by Waterloo’s incredible talent. The University of Waterloo is one of the world’s top-25 computer science schools and produces more engineers than Stanford and MIT combined. The school also has a long history in cybersecurity – the founders of companies like BlackBerry and eSentire are also alumni – and is leading the way on quantum security technologies. Conestoga College, home to excellent cybersecurity and technology programs, is also a key recruiting ground.
On top of our talent pipeline, the Waterloo community has 50+ companies working in cybersecurity and related fields, which means there’s a substantial local specialist workforce.