Cofense Secures Additional Investment from Funds Managed by BlackRock

LEESBURG, Va., Aug. 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cofense™, the global leader in intelligent phishing defense solutions, today announced that funds managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners have taken an additional ownership position in Cofense, having acquired the equity of former investor Pamplona. Cofense is pleased to expand the partnership, initially inked in 2018, which will continue to support the company's mission to help organizations stop phishing attacks in their tracks.  Private Equity Partners is BlackRock's fund of private equity funds platform that sources and evaluates the full spectrum of private markets investing, including partnerships, direct co-investments, and secondary transactions.

"We met with dozens of world-class financial institutions who were keen to invest. We're delighted that BlackRock was the winning bidder, as they are familiar with our business and already have a strong relationship with Cofense," said Rohyt Belani, Co-Founder and CEO, Cofense. "BlackRock's expanded investment is a direct reflection of their confidence in our company and the growing market opportunity. Cofense has a history of successfully uncovering and reporting threats from all corners of the globe, but we are particularly proud of our track record for taking all possible measures to protect our customers, partners and prospects from phishing attacks."

In the previous 12 months, Cofense has accelerated its efforts to bring reliable, best-in-class phishing defense solutions to the global market, and as a result the fourth quarter (2018) and first quarter (2019) were the two most successful in company history. The company has close to 2,000 enterprise clients in over 150 countries, representing every major vertical from energy, financial, healthcare to manufacturing and high-technology. Since July 2018, Cofense has expanded its product suite to deliver turnkey solutions for employee education and awareness to phishing response. The company will continue investing in R&D to provide their customers with peak phishing protection across the organization.

In addition to technical accolades, including being positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Awareness Computer-Based Training for the fourth consecutive year, Cofense has been recognized for its culture and team leadership. The company was named a 2018 Best Place to Work by the Washington Post and Washington Business Journal and included on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies. Most notably, Cofense has been honored multiple times in 2019 for raising the standards of excellent customer service, as a finalist for the 2019 SC Awards and HDI Team Awards, and as a winner of the ISPG Global Excellence Awards. The company also successfully completed a Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type II examination for Cofense PhishMe™ and Hosted Cofense Triage™.

For more information about Cofense, please visit https://cofense.com.

About Cofense
Cofense™, formerly PhishMe®, is the leading provider of intelligent phishing defense solutions world-wide. Cofense delivers a collaborative approach to cybersecurity by enabling organization-wide engagement to active email threats. Our collective defense suite combines timely attack intelligence sourced from employees with best-in-class incident response technologies to stop attacks faster and stay ahead of breaches. Cofense customers include Global 1000 organizations in defense, energy, financial services, healthcare and manufacturing sectors that understand how changing user behavior will improve security, aid incident response and reduce the risk of compromise.

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SOURCE Cofense