Cyber security start-up Tanium is planning to float on the stock exchange in the next 18 months, according to its CEO.

The company will apparently start the formal process of filing in six months, Orion Hindawi told the Financial Times, after experiencing substantial growth over the last year.

He also suggested that the company already had an idea of the bank that it would work with on the initial public offering.

According to Hindawi, many companies in Silicon Valley are afraid to go public, an attitude he called unhealthy.

“I know the CEOs of a lot of these companies … they think their creativity would be diminished. I’m not sure I understand that ethos,” said Hindawi.

Orion Hindawi and father David founded the company in 2012.
Orion Hindawi and father David founded the company in 2012.

In September 2015, a new funding round involving investment from TPG, Institutional Venture Partners and Franklin Templeton and Geodesic Partners pushed Tanium’s value to $3.5 billion.

The company has been named in Fortune’s top 25 most important private companies and boasts among its customers the US Department of Defence, eight of the world’s top ten banks, Amazon and Nasdaq.

Tanium is able to quickly query endpoints within the network through its architecture.

As opposed to a hub and spoke model, in which a server sends a query directly to each individual endpoint, only the first and last endpoint connect directly to the server.

The dashboard of Tanium's product.
The dashboard of Tanium’s product.

 

When a query is sent, the endpoint takes the query from the server and sends it around the ring. The endpoints send their response to the next one in the ring. Finally, the last endpoint in the chain aggregates all of the responses and sends them back to the server.

  • The company was founded in 2007.
  • In 2012 it came to market after working with four key beta customers on the platform.
  • Since 2014 the staff has grown from 50 people to 500.
  • It is set to achieve $270m in sales in 2016, which is an 80 percent increase from 2015 sales.
The product wants to be "Google search for the enterprise."
The product wants to be “Google search for the enterprise.”

Tanium’s Technical Lead, Dylan DeAnda, told CBR in August that there are three things he wants to emphasise about the product: “speed, scale and simplicity.”

The basic sales pitch is this: what if you could get up to date information about what was going on on your network in 15 seconds?

He describes Tanium as “Google search for your enterprise.”

 

Read CBR’s interview with Tanium’s technical lead Dylan DeAnda here.