O’Melveny Worldwide

With O’Melveny as Advisor, Avid is Acquired by Sophos

January 8, 2019

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Silicon Valley—January 8, 2019—O’Melveny represented cloud infrastructure security company Avid Secure in its acquisition by Sophos, a leader in network and endpoint security.

Based in San Francisco and with engineering operations in India, Avid Secure uses artificial intelligence and automation to tackle the increasingly important issue of effective cloud security. Its acquisition is expected to help Sophos better protect its customers’ data on endpoints and networks.

The O’Melveny team was led by Silicon Valley partner David Makarechian, and associates Chris Wheeler and AJ Talt. Counsel Brian Danella and Tom Oslovar provided IP advice, senior counsel Warren Fox advised on employee benefits issues, and special counsel Scott Pink advised on privacy law issues.

The following press release was issued by Sophos:

Sophos Acquires Avid Secure to Expand Protection for Public Cloud Environments

OXFORD, U.K. – January 8, 2019 – Sophos (LSE: SOPH), a global leader in network and endpoint security, today announced that it has acquired next-generation cloud infrastructure security company, Avid Secure. Avid Secure offers an artificial intelligence-based cloud security analytics, compliance, and DevSecOps platform to provide effective end-to-end protection in public cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and Google.

Founded in 2017 by a team of highly distinguished leaders in IT security, Avid Secure uses artificial intelligence and automation to address the real-world challenges of effective cloud security including lack of workload visibility, and the constant monitoring required to stay ahead of today’s sophisticated attacks. Avid Secure is a small, privately owned company with headquarters in San Francisco, Calif. and engineering operations in Gurgaon, India.

“The accelerated adoption of public cloud environments is presenting new data security challenges to organizations. With the cloud workload protection and the cloud security posture management software from Avid Secure, Sophos will expand its current capabilities in cloud security and drive leadership in this growing space,” commented Dan Schiappa, senior vice president and general manager of Products at Sophos. “We welcome the Avid Secure team to Sophos and are excited to bring their transformational technology into our portfolio, strengthening our ability to offer the best protection for our customers’ data on endpoints and networks, wherever their services are hosted.”

“We built the Avid Secure platform to revolutionize the security of public cloud environments in a process efficient way,” said Nikhil Gupta, CEO and co-founder at Avid Secure. “We are proud of our innovative AI powered technology that provides enterprises with end-to-end continuous security analytics, visibility, and compliance to protect their data and maximize their investments in public cloud services. The opportunity to join Sophos in their mission to evolve cybersecurity into an intelligent, integrated system presented a perfect fit for our engineering vision. I, and the whole team at Avid Secure look forward to what we can achieve together.”

Sophos is not releasing further details at this time.

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About Avid Secure

Avid Secure Platform is a next-generation cloud infrastructure security platform that combines deep security expertise with the power of AI to deliver intelligent security analytics, compliance automation, and rugged DevSecOps with a simple to use interface. It is the only agentless platform that secures cloud infrastructure end-to-end - From development to production. Avid Secure helps businesses reduce the time and cost to secure their infrastructure, saves up to 30% on compliance cost, and streamlines collaboration between security and DevOps teams, simplifying cloud security operations. The platform processes millions of metrics in real-time, applying AI models to detect unauthorized and malicious behavior.

About Sophos

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos’ complete security solutions as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Simple to deploy, manage, and use, Sophos’ award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, mobile and network security solutions are backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K., and is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange under the symbol “SOPH.” More information is available at www.sophos.com/company.