Lookout’s long-running transition to becoming an enterprise security company is all but complete, revealing today that it’s selling its consumer mobile security business to Finland’s F-Secure in a deal valued at around $223 million.
Founded out of San Francisco in 2009, Lookout originally started as a consumer-focused smartphone security and data backup business, garnering millions of users and hundreds of millions in funding from esteemed investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Greylock, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Telekom and Jeff Bezos.
Over the past 10 years, Lookout has gradually extended its reach into the business realm, notching up enterprise partnerships with technology giants such as Samsung along the way. A couple of years back, Lookout went most of the way toward cementing its B2B credentials when it snapped up cloud-native cybersecurity startup CipherCloud, a company focused on the growing secure access service edge (SASE) security segment.
Fast-forward to today, and while Lookout still offers a suite of security products for the consumer market, including antivirus software for smartphones, it’s clear that its trajectory in recent years has been heading much closer to the enterprise, which is why it’s offloading pretty much all of the remnants of its consumer business to F-Secure — a long-established European consumer cybersecurity company that sells everything from password management tools to antivirus applications.
A ‘pure-play enterprise company’
Lookout says that with this transaction, which it expects to conclude within the next two months, its business will “now evolve into a pure-play enterprise company,” focusing on cloud and mobile endpoint security. The company said that the proceeds from the sale will be be plowed back into its enterprise products, alongside the $150 million in debt-financing it secured from BlackRock last summer.
“Our success in the highly competitive enterprise market has compelled us to focus our product and go-to-market efforts to gain advantage,” Lookout CEO Jim Dolce noted in a press release. “By doubling down on the enterprise market, we’ll be better positioned to capitalize on its projected hypergrowth, fueled by an increase in remote and hybrid work, a shift to cloud-based delivery models and the transition to zero-trust architectures.”
For F-Secure, the deal gives it a stronger foothold in the U.S. market specifically, as well as bolstering its existing consumer software lineup with a suite of fairly similar products.
“In line with F-Secure strategy, we are seeking growth both organically and through acquisitions,” F-Secure CEO Timo Laaksonen said in a statement. “The acquisition of Lookout consumer business unit is a significant step in developing our business in the United States. With a complementary software product portfolio and strong competence in developing mobile products, Lookout consumer business unit is a perfect fit for F-Secure.”
*This article was updated with a deal valuation and additional comment from F-Secure.
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