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State Owned Capital Supports Micro Step Online Shoal And Threatens Intelligence Market

2020/10/10 10:29:00 16

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In recent years, with all walks of life from offline to online, the value of enterprise digital assets has increased significantly, and the demand for network security services is becoming more and more urgent.

The network security market has grown rapidly. According to the white paper on China's network security industry (2020) released by China Academy of communications and communications in September this year, the scale of China's network security industry has reached 156.359 billion yuan in 2019, and it is estimated that the industry scale will be about 170.2 billion yuan in 2020.

As one of the subdivisions of network security, threat intelligence market is gradually rising. Micro step online is a start-up company focusing on the market. It develops in secaas (security as a service) mode. At present, it has more than 300 large enterprise customers from energy, finance, intelligent manufacturing, Internet and other industries, such as state grid, PetroChina, industrial and Commercial Bank of China, ant group, oppo, Jingdong, etc.

With the rapid development of business and the high renewal rate of customers, micro step online has been recognized at the capital level. In the early stage of development, the company has obtained investment from Aurora Borealis, cloud Angel Fund and Hillhead capital. On September 21, this year, Weibo online officially announced the completion of RMB 300 million d-round financing, and obtained joint capital injection from several state-owned investment institutions such as CICC capital, CITIC Securities and Yunhui capital.

What changes will the state-owned capital bring to micro step online? What new strategic deployment will the company make in the future?

High renewal rate brings continuous income guarantee

Micro step online was established in July 2015 to provide threat detection products and services for enterprise customers. At present, the company has more than 200 people. Xue Feng, the founder of the company, previously served as the chief information security officer of Amazon (China) and the Internet security strategy director of Microsoft. The other members of the team mainly come from bat, meituan and other companies.

"The network security industry has many subdivisions. For micro step, we don't want to be a comprehensive security manufacturer, but we want to develop professionally and become a threat detection and response expert in the security field." Xue Feng said.

In his opinion, the core of the security field is security operation, and the detection and response of threats are the core of operation. Micro step online hopes to cut into the network security market with threat intelligence capability, and build a comprehensive "detection response" product matrix with the core capability of Security Cloud Based on massive intelligence data.

"Despite the impact of the epidemic this year, our business has maintained a fairly high growth rate." Xue Feng said. In the last year and the year before last, micro step online has maintained a business growth rate of two or three times. Even affected by the epidemic, the first half of this year's performance of micro step online is still 2.4 times that of the same period last year.

Why can micro step achieve sustained growth in performance? Xue Feng revealed that on the one hand, micro step online based on SaaS service mode is continuously expanding new industries and new enterprise customers. At the end of last year, micro step online had less than 200 customers, and now the company has more than 300 customers. Among them, the customer price of most users ranges from several hundred thousand to millions every year.

On the other hand, the continuous payment of old users is one of the core reasons for the company's sustainable growth. The renewal rate of micro step online customers is close to 95%, which is a high proportion in domestic SaaS enterprises, while the renewal rate of most other enterprises is 50% and 70%.

If the renewal rate of an enterprise is only 50%, it means that the enterprise may lose half of its customers every year, and can only do business with users twice, which is not different from selling hardware. If the renewal rate is 70%, on average, enterprises can do business with users three times. Micro step online has a renewal rate of nearly 95%, which means that it can continue to do business with users for more than ten years, which guarantees the stable income of the company in the future.

Crowdstrike, a benchmarking company in the US market, also has a high renewal rate. It is understood that crowdstrike was founded in 2011. From 2012 to 2013, crowdstrike launched Falcon x, a threat intelligence service, and Falcon insight, a terminal detection and response (EDR) product. After that, it continuously added product lines and built a complete security ecology of terminal security products + threat intelligence services + expert services and SaaS + PAAS. In 2019, the revenue from crowdstrike subscription service accounts for 88%, the revenue retention rate reaches 98%, and the net retention rate is 124%.

CICC capital brings long-term value

Crowdstrike was listed on NASDAQ in June last year and has a market value of about $30 billion. For micro step online, due to its brilliant business performance, it has been recognized by the primary market. Recently, the company has just announced the completion of a 300 million yuan round of d-round financing. The main investors are CICC capital, CITIC Securities, Yunhui capital, etc.

Xue Feng disclosed that this round of d-round financing is progressing smoothly, which was started in May and completed in August. Generally, round D financing takes about half a year, while micro step only takes three months. At the same time, even if there are factors affecting the epidemic, the company's valuation has been greatly improved.

He also told the 21st century economic report that during this round of financing, the company actually got a lot of TS, and finally chose state-owned investment institutions. On the one hand, considering that network security is closely related to national strategy and national security, the introduction of state-owned assets can play a certain role in endorsing micro step brands.

On the other hand, CICC and CITIC are also very influential in the secondary market. The introduction of such shareholders is also preparation for the future development of the secondary market. "However, there is no specific listing timetable." Xue added. This round of financing will continue to be used for further market expansion and product development. To build an automatic, intelligent and visual product line of the whole scene and life cycle, and promote the full application of secaas.

Regarding the investment, Wang Lei, managing director of CICC capital, said that the traditional security measures based on "building high walls, building checkpoints, rather killing mistakes" have gradually been unable to cope with the increasing network threats and risks. Based on dynamic threat intelligence and with effective and active detection methods as tools, enabling enterprises to find threats in time and concentrate superior resources to deal with risks quickly will become the trend of network security development. Dynamic threat intelligence with the ability of continuous evolution and improvement has long-term important value in network security.

"We believe that as a pioneer of Threat Intelligence and active threat detection products, micro step online has accumulated a lot of technical product advantages, and has accumulated a large number of real application scenarios and customer base in the fields of finance, energy, government and large and medium-sized enterprises. We believe that micro step online can maintain its leading position in the industry for a long time, become a core value enterprise in the field of network security, and have long-term investment value. " He said.

 

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