Congratulations to Dor Knafo, Gil Azrielant, Shuky Chen, and the entire team at Axis Security on their acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)!
We’ve been incredibly bullish on Axis from first meeting Dor and Gil in late 2019 and were lucky enough to lead the Series B in the summer of 2020. Their early ambitions to make access simpler, safer, and more reliable have come to life through its market-leading Security Service Edge (SSE) platform, Atmos – and we’re incredibly proud of all they’ve accomplished in such a short period of time.
As I wrote back in 2020, Axis emerged from stealth just as the reality of COVID set in and companies scrambled to support remote workers and maintain business continuity. Dor and Gil intimately understood this market from the beginning, which enabled them to build the business quickly. In just two years, this category of SSE has quickly become a standard budget item for many large enterprises – and Axis is among the top vendors. It’s also why they count many Fortune 500 and 2000 companies as customers in sectors spanning financial services, hospitality, tech, and pharmaceuticals among others.
The appeal in Axis is quite apparent now: a new approach to make secure access amazingly simple for employees, partners, vendors, and contractors – no matter where they’re located. While VPNs worked well enough for edge cases, the last few years have proven that they don’t stand up in everyday use that “work from anywhere” policies require. Axis represents the future of corporate security solutions that attempt to better protect data, deliver a better user experience and even reduce costs for businesses.
On top of distilling the vision and building the platform to deliver on it, Dor and Gil have also proven themselves as incredibly mature, thoughtful leaders. They’ve worked hard to earn the trust of enterprise customers, stayed intentional in adding features to the platform, and despite a very challenging hiring market, brought on the right people to round out the management team. We at Canaan, are proud to have played an important role in helping them set up and scale their GTM operations. From the very beginning, our Canaan Build team worked with them closely. Our operating partner Howard Greenfield worked closely with the team to advise on GTM strategy, even going as far as to fill in as their interim chief revenue officer and support in closing several enterprise deals. (We mean it when we say we’re not afraid to get in the weeds at Canaan!)
Now part of HPE and Aruba, we’re excited about their plans to make Axis a key component of their SSE strategy. They have complementary capabilities, and HPE intends to provide significant resources to scale the business and innovate the Atmos platform.
We’re grateful to have been part of this journey and excited for their future with HPE. Congrats to Dor, Gil, Shuky, and the entire Axis team!