Andreessen-Backed Tanium Lands $120 Million in Round Led by TPG and IVP

Tanium, the security and systems management startup, said today that it has secured a $120 million investment round led by private equity firm TPG and Institutional Venture Partners.

Sources familiar with the terms of the deal say the investment values Tanium at $3.5 billion, or double the valuation it received in March when it accepted $52 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $1.75 billion.

Tanium’s software is a combination of an IT security and systems management tool aimed at large-scale corporate computing environments. The software can quickly scan and map out all the machines and devices running on a corporate network — IT managers like to refer to them collectively as “endpoints” — and track the software running on them. More importantly the software can be used to quickly issue updates to every endpoint, which is especially useful if a network is under attack.

The investment is a bit of a surprise as Tanium had appeared reticent to take more funding.

“We didn’t expect to be raising money again so soon,” founder and CTO Orion Hindawi said in an interview.

Until today, Andresseen had been Tanium’s only outside investor, having ponied up a combined $142 million over two years, including a $90 million round last year. Hindawi said that Tanium has been cash-flow positive and still has most of the capital it has raised — about $250 million — in the bank.

“It’s fair to assume that Tanium will eventually go public,” Hindawi said, though he declined to speculate on when that might be. “When we do it will be helpful to have friends at firms like T. Rowe Price and TPG.

The company has been active in recent months. In July it inked a strategic alliance with the consulting firm PwC and in June it launched a forensics tool to help companies investigate security breaches. Also in June it named David Damato, a former executive with the security company FireEye, as its chief security officer and expanded its offices in Washington, D.C., where it does a lot of business with government agencies and defense firms.

Hindawi was previously the founder of BigFix, a software firm that specialized in automating software updates for PCs and other systems. He started it in 1997 and by 2010 had sold it to IBM in a deal that was said at the time to be worth about $400 million. It’s now a product known as IBM Endpoint Manager.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.