Carbon Black (acquired by Bit9)

Carbon Black, originally founded as Bit9 in 2002 by Todd Brennan, Allen Hillery, and John Hanratty, operates in the cybersecurity sector, specializing in cloud-native endpoint protection. The company's initial focus was on application whitelisting, a proactive security approach that only allows trusted applications to run on a system. This strategy was born from the founders' previous experiences, including the sale of their first company, Okena, to Cisco Systems, and a desire to create security solutions that were easier to implement. A notable milestone in the company's history was a security breach in 2013, which provided the impetus to further advance their security offerings.

In February 2014, Bit9 acquired Carbon Black, a startup focused on endpoint detection and response (EDR), founded by Ben Johnson and Michael Viscuso. Viscuso, who had a background as an offensive hacker for the NSA and CIA, developed technology to detect attacker behaviors, which led to the creation of Carbon Black and the EDR market. Following the acquisition, the combined entity operated as "Bit9 + Carbon Black" before officially rebranding to Carbon Black, Inc. on February 1, 2016. This merger paired Bit9's threat prevention with Carbon Black's incident response capabilities, enabling customers to detect, prevent, and respond to cyberthreats in real time. Patrick Morley, who became CEO of Bit9 in 2007, continued to lead the company through this transition and its subsequent growth.

The company's business model centers on providing a cloud-native endpoint and workload protection platform. This platform, known as the Carbon Black Cloud, utilizes big data and analytics to analyze customers' unfiltered data for threats. The product suite offers a range of security services, including application control, next-generation antivirus (NGAV), and endpoint detection and response (EDR), designed to protect organizations from malicious files and behavior. The company serves a diverse client base, from small businesses to large enterprises and government agencies, including approximately one-third of the Fortune 100. Revenue is generated through the sale of its security software and services. The company went public on May 4, 2018, raising approximately $152 million. In October 2019, VMware acquired Carbon Black for $2.1 billion, integrating it as the core of its new Security Business Unit. Subsequently, Broadcom acquired VMware in a transaction completed in November 2023.

Keywords: endpoint security, cloud-native protection, cybersecurity, threat detection, incident response, application whitelisting, endpoint detection and response, EDR, next-generation antivirus, NGAV, threat prevention, workload protection, security analytics, big data security, malware prevention, application control, VMware, Broadcom, enterprise security, data security