FireEye said it has received a USD 400 million from US private equity firm Blackstone, with fellow equity firm ClearSky acting as co-investor in the transaction. FireEye said it will use the money to support its strategic growth initiatives, including its latest acquisition of Respond Software, and to help push growth further for its cloud, platform and managed services portfolio.
Under the investment deal, FireEye will appoint Viral Patel, a senior MD at Blackstone, to its board of directors upon completion of the deal, conditional on the usual closing conditions. Blackstone and ClearSky will purchase USD 400 million in shares of a newly designated 4.5 percent Series A Convertible Preferred Stock in FireEye, priced at USD 1,000 per share. The convertible shares will be convertible into normal shares at USD 18.00 per share.
FireEye said it closed the acquisition of Respond Software on 18 November, for USD 186 million in cash and stock. Respond is a cybersecurity investigation automation company and creator the Respond Analyst. FireEye said the transactikon will open new market opportunities for the eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities.
The Respond Analyst is an XDR engine that accelerates cyber investigation and response by automating the correlation of multi-sourced attack evidence using cloud-based data science models that ingest data from a comprehensive set of security technologies. The technology will become a key part of the Mandiant Advantage platform, bringing vendor-agnostic XDR and investigation capabilities that can integrate with any customer environment. Also, the combination of cloud-based correlation and intelligent data science models will be used in the delivery of Mandiant Managed Defense, speeding response times and providing better security outcomes for customers while scaling existing Managed Defense resources to protect more customers.
