(L to R): ExtraHop CTO Jesse Rothstein CTO; CEO Arif Kareem; Raja Mukerji, Chief Customer Officer and co-founder (ExtraHop Photo)

Cyber attacks against companies are becoming increasingly common and more expensive. Those troubling stats help explain the rapid growth of companies such as Seattle’s ExtraHop that focus on protecting enterprises from cyber threats.

ExtraHop posted its second consecutive year of more than 40 percent bookings growth in 2019 and its headcount rose 25 percent during the year. The company has hinted at a 2020 IPO in the past, and it is piling up momentum ahead of possibly going public.

ExtraHop said this week it finished the year with $150 million bookings — the amount a customer has promised to pay, as opposed to actual revenue — a 50 percent increase over 2018, when the company hit a milestone of $100 million in bookings. Bookings are an imperfect measure of success in the software-as-a-service world, but the metric gives a peek at where the company is heading going into the new year.

“Global cybercrime has turned into a multi-trillion dollar industry, and it’s growing every day,” ExtraHop CEO Arif Kareem said. “To combat this threat and minimize impact, organizations are shifting investment from prevention and protection to detection and response.”

The company ended the year with more than 500 employees, up from 400 a year ago. It made several high-profile additions throughout the last year.

ExtraHop uses machine learning to help companies detect and eliminate threats on their networks. A few years ago, the company plunged deeper into security, building off its existing network monitoring technology.

The company originally launched its security technology as a way of helping companies managing their own servers find performance roadblocks, but has since expanded that to the cloud as well as hybrid cloud environments. ExtraHop in 2019 partnered with leading cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft and Google to advance threat detection and response technology for cloud workloads.

Cybersecurity will become a $267 billion market by 2024, according to a recent report from Mordor Intelligence. The Pacific Northwest has become a hotspot for this type of work, with 10 security and identity startups making the GeekWire 200 ranking of the region’s top startups. ExtraHop is ranked No. 19 on the list, up from 23 a year ago.

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