Cybersecurity firm to acquire complementary business for $80M

CLEARWATER — KnowBe4 Inc. (NASDAQ: KNBE), a provider of security awareness training and a widely used simulated phishing platform, has agreed to acquire SecurityAdvisor for $80 million in cash and stock. The deal, according to a news release, is expected to close by the end of the year.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., SecurityAdvisor’s technology, the release states, can help identify and correlate human behavior-driven security alerts generated across each layer of an existing security stack. The alerts are mapped to “micro-learning opportunities” that are pushed out to users via apps such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, immediately educating the user.

KnowBe4, in the release, says it will be able to feed correlated user behavior data back to its security operations center, enabling security teams to identify and remediate gaps in the overall cybersecurity architecture and help make customers’ existing investments in security products more valuable.

“We remain committed to strengthening the human defense layer within security architecture and, with the addition of the SecurityAdvisor technology to the existing KnowBe4 platform, we believe we are creating a new category of security called human detection and response or HDR,” KnowBe4 founder and CEO Stu Sjouwerman states in the release. “We see this combination as a great addition to the existing capabilities of our platform as we believe it will enable true behavioral change and help build a more effective and mature security culture much faster. Finally, we view the addition of SecurityAdvisor to our platform as an accelerator to our product roadmap.”

KnowBe4 went public earlier this year. In 2020, it generated $174.89 million in gross revenue, up from $120.58 million in 2019 — an increase of 45%.