Andreessen Horowitz Bets Big on Tanium — Again

Orion HindawiTanium, an eight-year-old, Emeryville, Ca.-based company founded by father and son David and Orion Hindawi, has landed $52 million from Andreessen Horowitz less than a year after raising $90 million from the Sand Hill Road firm.

Somewhat amazingly, it hasn’t touched a penny of it, either, says Orion Hindawi, the company’s CTO.

In fact, Tanium — whose security and systems management software can deliver all kinds of information about every machine and device running on a corporate network within seconds – has been profitable since 2012, and it’s growing fast, says Hindawi. Last year, it increased its total billings by 400 percent and grew its employee base from 25 to 175. It plans to employ between 500 and 600 people by year end.

So why raise quite so much? Two reasons, says Hindawi. The company is seeing an “immense amount of opportunity” that it wants to “even more aggressively” pursue — particularly in international markets like Japan, England, and Australia, where its business has begun to take off.

Tanium has also mapped out how much it needs to survive for three years without revenue in the case of a “black swan” event. “I like real cushions,” says Hindawi, who cofounded an earlier company with his father called BigFix that launched in 1999. BigFix survived the dot com boom and bust, eventually selling to IBM in 2010 for a reported $400 million. But the downturn also made Hindawi acutely aware of how challenging it is to survive lousy market conditions.

Not that he needs to worry this time around, seemingly.

Andreessen Horowitz is so taken by Tanium’s technology that despite its enormous investment in the company, it owns “substantially less than 25 percent,” says Hindawi.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that Hindawi thinks highly of Andreessen Horowitz, too. He points to the expertise of of Andreessen partner and former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofksy, who sits on Tanium’s board. (“Usually, I’ve dealt with VCs who didn’t have direct knowledge of our space,” Hindawi says.)

He also cites Andreessen Horowitz’s “executive briefing center,” a low-flying, 50-person unit that focuses narrowly on bringing in customers to the firm’s enterprise portfolio companies.

It’s “one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” says Hindawi, who says that half of Tanium’s customers have come from its own pipeline. The other half, he says, have come through Andreessen Horowitz.


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