Our Continued Investment in Corelight: The Industry Standard for Open Network Detection and Response

We’re excited to share that Accel is once again partnering with Corelight to lead its Series E. 

Our relationship with Corelight began in 2016, when we first met Dr. Vern Paxon and his renowned technical team out of Berkeley. They were the force behind Zeek (then called Bro), the open-source foundation underlying Corelight’s network data platform. Corelight quickly became the fastest growing open source security project, and was consistently selected by top cyber experts for network visibility to support incident response, forensics, and alerting. Accel led the Series A a year later. 

Since those early days, Corelight has impressed us on three core dimensions: 

1. The richness and quality of its detections based on Zeek and Suricata  
2. The extensibility of its platform. While other tools act as walled gardens and offer limited data portability, Corelight enables customers to bring their own SIEM  
3. Its criticality in SOC analysts’ workflows

Corelight is one of those special companies that is deeply focused on a highly technical yet important problem that doesn’t often get the fanfare or credit it deserves. But in the decade since its founding, it’s quietly become the industry standard for NDR, powering Security Operations Centers (SOC) at some of the most sensitive, mission-critical enterprises in the world. Today, Corelight serves over 100 enterprise customers that have at least $5b+ in revenue each, across a horizontal customer base of financial services, government, transportation, retail, and more. This is a testament to CEO Brian Dye and his team’s incredible vision and execution. 

With new threat vectors, the proliferation of ransomware, and the adoption of Gen AI, we believe that the need for ground-truth network data has never been more important, and its technology is driving advances in AI-driven security operations, cloud visibility and detection, and next-gen SIEM development. 

Accel has a long history of investing in category-defining security companies like Crowdstrike, Tenable, Snyk, Axonius, and Cyera. In Corelight, we see the same transformative capabilities for the future of NDR. We are thrilled to extend our partnership with Brian and the rest of the Corelight team, alongside our friends at Crowdstrike and Cisco, as they continue to advance open NDR capabilities for security teams worldwide.