Cybersecurity continues to be a pernicious and complex problem, for enterprises, and today a company that's building a multi-faceted toolkit to help them address it better is announcing a big round of funding to continue its growth. BlueVoyant -- which provides a mix of proprietary technology, third-party best-in-class tools and professional services to implement those solutions to manage both internal and external risks to an organization -- has raised $250 million, funding that it will use to continue developing its technology, expanding its team, and breaking into new markets beyond the 50 where it is active today.

BlueVoyant is currently adding two countries each quarter, CEO and co-founder Jim Rosenthal said in an interview, and it has around 500 customers globally across some 16 different industries, a mix of large enterprises (with "tens of thousands of employees") that use BlueVoyant to augment their own internal security teams, and smaller organizations that rely more completely on BlueVoyant to manage their wider cyberdefense strategy.

This is a Series D round, and it's coming in at a "unicorn" valuation -- although the company is not specifying an exact number beyond being over $1 billion. The last time we covered BlueVoyant, when it raised an $82.5 million in 2019, it was valued at $430 million.

BlueVoyant caught my attention previously in part because of its pedigree: the co-founders are Rosenthal and Tom Glocer, who respectively were previously the COO of Morgan Stanley and the CEO of Thomson Reuters (and later a director at the financial services giant). And that background,some of that has when Rosenthal was COO of Morgan Stanley and Glocer was a director at the financial services giant latest round is bringing in some high-profile names that speak to some of the company's pedigree: it was led by Liberty Strategic Capital, the PE firm founded and run by Steven T. Mnuchin, the former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, with Temasek-founded ISTARI and Eden Global Partners among the other investors in this round. (Mnuchin is joining BlueVoyant’s board with the round.)

Traction has undoubtedly also played a role here. Rosenthal notes that in this most recent period of Covid-fuelled digital transformation and heightened focus on cybersecurity has seen the startup grow annual recurring revenues over 100% annually -- specifically 117% -- on average in each of the last four years. Customers, meanwhile have grown by 80%.