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. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded out of Boston in 2009, Lookout originally started out 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.
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 mobile endpoint security and cloud security. While it didn’t disclose how much it gained for its consumer business, it said that the proceeds 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.”