Lookout sells its consumer cybersecurity business to F-Secure and goes all out in the business

Lookout’s long-running transition to becoming an enterprise security company is nearly complete, today revealing that it is selling its consumer mobile security business to Finland’s F-Secure. The terms of the contract are not disclosed.

Founded in Boston in 2009, Lookout began as a consumer-focused smartphone data security and backup company, raising millions of users and hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from esteemed investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Greylock, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Telekom, and Jeff Bezos.

Over the past 10 years, Lookout has steadily expanded its business reach, establishing corporate partnerships with tech giants such as Samsung along the way. A few years ago, Lookout made most of the way to consolidating its B2B credentials when it acquired cloud-native cybersecurity startup CipherCloud, a company focused on the growing edge security segment of the service. secure access (SASE).

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 come a lot closer to company, which is why it’s offloading pretty much all the remnants of its consumer business to F-Secure, a long-established European consumer cybersecurity company that sells everything from password management tools switch to antivirus applications.

Lookout says that with this transaction, which it expects to close within the next two months, its business will now “evolve into a pure-play business,” focusing on mobile device security and cloud security. Although he did not reveal how much he earned for his consumer business, he said the proceeds would be reinvested in his enterprise products, alongside the $150 million debt financing he secured from BlackRock last summer.

“Our success in the highly competitive enterprise marketplace has forced us to focus our product and go-to-market efforts to gain an advantage,” Lookout CEO Jim Dolce said in a press release. “By doubling the enterprise market, we will be better positioned to capitalize on its projected hypergrowth, fueled by an increase in remote and hybrid working, a shift to cloud-based delivery models, and the transition to zero-trust architectures. .”