The startup ended up taking $30 million from Highland Capital in 2014 in its first (and up to now only) round of funding. While VCs caught wind of the growth and began to knock on their door, it was only in 2013 that the startup began to take their requests for coffee meetings. It went viral in the first year, he said: “The same community we came from started recommending this product.” The pair made $600,000 in their first year of selling the software, and they had never met in person. Together, they collaborated on the first version of Malwarebytes, which was released in 2008, while Kleczynski was a student at the University of Illinois.
The company started almost by accident, after Chicago-based Kleczynski met Boston resident Bruce Harrison- who is now the company’s VP Research - through a security forum where both were troubleshooting their own computer problems.
MALWAREBYTE SOFTWARE
And in particular, he said he’d like to move into the currently hot area of ad-blocking software - most likely by buying an existing startup to do so.Īt a time when we are seeing a lot of overheated valuations for startups, and many speak of how easy it is to raise money, Malwarebytes provides an interesting counterpoint. In future he’d like to build more for all those platforms.
MALWAREBYTE ANDROID
Today the company’s software covers Windows, Android and Mac products.
“We are profitable, cashflow positive, and growing quickly.”Īnd as for that quick growth, Kleczynski told TechCrunch that the funding will be used to continue expanding the current business - hiring, product development and marketing - but also for acquisitions to add new products to the mix. “Fidelity may be in the news because of those write-downs but that hasn’t been a problem for us,” Kleczynski said. Marcin Kleczynski - the teenage cofounder who is now Malwarebytes’ 26-year-old CEO - says that Malwarebytes caught Fidelity’s attention in part because of its $100 million run rate. But Fidelity is also known as a potential breaker: its write-downs of some of the bigger valuations have been well documented and have caused ripple effects well beyond their portfolios’ boardrooms. Its newest investor, Fidelity, is well known in the startup world as a kingmaker - it has backed the likes of Uber, Snapchat, Airbnb and SpaceX with large rounds and ever-larger valuations. And now, to grow further, it is announcing that it has raised $50 million from Fidelity Management and Research Company. Today the startup’s software is used by millions of consumers and some 70,000 businesses to protect from and clean up computer viruses, worms, trojan horses and more. Malwarebytes, a security company that started when its cofounder was still a teenager fixing his parents’ infected computer, has come a long way from its bootstrapped roots.