BitDefender

LocationBucharest, Romania

URLwww.bitdefender.com

Founded 1990

CEO Daniel Ionescu

Employees 200

Funding N/A

Key Investors N/A

A company called BitDefender based in the land of Count Dracula—there’s a joke in there somewhere. Romania is not known for its high technology, but Softwin, the parent company of BitDefender, is carving out a niche in the Balkans. And BitDefender is branching out from its Bucharest headquarters. The company boasts 41 million customers in 100 countries for its antivirus software. With North Korean agents and Russian gangsters still reputedly churning out viruses, peddling a defense is good business. By some reckonings, the antivirus software business will be $2.6 billion in 2007. But BitDefender is not the only company swooping in to sink its teeth into the market.

Discretix

LocationNetanya, Israel

URLwww.discretix.com

Founded 2000

CEO Gal Salomon

Employees 70

Funding $17.5 million, 2 rounds

Key Investors Accel Partners, Pitango Venture Capital, Genesis Partners, Jerusalem Global Ventures, Shrem-Fudim-Kelner & Co., Poalim Ventures, Eurocom Group

Discretix is a security specialist providing embedded security technology to two main markets: mobile devices like cell phones and pure storage devices like USB flash drives. The company lets customers include security at the chipset level, giving users a more seamless experience. Customers include Ericsson, SanDisk, and Philips, and the company is working with Texas Instruments to develop security protocols for TI’s chipsets. Discretix’ competitors include SafeNet and larger companies like Nokia that maintain internal departments working on security.

EricssonTexas InstrumentsNokia

Exaprotect

LocationVilleurbanne, France

URLwww.exaprotect.com

Founded 2004

CEO Jean-Francois Dechant

Employees 42

Funding $7.2 million,2 rounds

Key Investors Jean-Francois Dechant, John Revillion

As businesses use more security products to protect their networks, they also face an avalanche of alerts warning them of suspicious behavior, many of which might be false alarms. Exaprotect helps companies manage the alerts by combining the information with business process rules. This intelligence helps organizations obtain a prioritized view of the behavior, greater visibility into the network, and improved response times to real threats. Exaprotect’s solution may be much needed, but the company is likely to get squeezed between the crop of new startups that have sprung up such as ArcSight, and entrenched players like CheckPoint that are increasingly looking to wedge into the security event management market.

Grisoft

LocationBrno, Czech Republic

URLwww.grisoft.cz

Founded 1991

CEO Karel Obluk

Employees 150

Funding $52 million,2 rounds

Key InvestorsIntelCapital, Enterprise Investors

Grisoft sells a suite of antivirus software and firewalls to protect consumers and businesses from worms, viruses, and Trojan Horses. Unlike proprietary antivirus companies like Symantec and McAfee, Grisoft’s antivirus scanning engine is based on open-source technologies. This also makes its products less expensive than those of its competitors. Grisoft claims it has more than 30 million users of its software worldwide. But in the highly commoditized world of antivirus software, Grisoft needs to better differentiate itself to take on international competitors such as Kaspersky and Microsoft, which is releasing an antivirus solution of its own next year.

Microsoft

Ingate Systems

LocationStockholm, Sweden

URLwww.ingate.com

Founded 1997

CEO Olle Westerberg

Employees 28

Funding $10.1 million,2 rounds

Key Investors Intertex Systems

As VoIP becomes more popular among businesses, security on those systems has become a concern. Ingate Systems makes firewalls for VoIP systems based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a technology standard used in Internet telephony. Spun off from the network security products department at Cendio Systems, Ingate protects not just VoIP but also IP-based audio and video conferencing systems. The company’s products also help integrate VoIP into an existing firewall, making it easier for businesses to protect their entire network. But in a highly competitive marketplace that includes companies like Bordeware, Sipera Systems, and Nortel, Ingate’s higher pricing could result in a few missed calls.

Nortel

SkyRecon Systems

Location Issy les Moulineaux, France

URLwww.skyrecon.com

Founded 2003

CEO Ravy Truchot

Employees 35

Funding $3 million, 1 round

Key Investors ACE (Advanced Capital Europe) Management

As viruses get smarter and faster, traditional security tools like patches and antivirus software are just not quick enough to stop threats. SkyRecon Systems’ technology recognizes and blocks dangerous behavior before it can affect the computer or the network. It monitors network traffic, operating system activity, and application behavior, correlating events at each of these levels to look for anything out of the ordinary. The technique is a step ahead of existing choices such as patching and signatures, but SkyRecon will have to convince customers that its product does not suffer from the problem of “false positives,” or events incorrectly labeled as potential threats, before it can find widespread acceptance.