Expanse raises $70 million to help businesses and governments track connected devices

Expanse, a company that indexes global internet protocol (IP) addresses, today announced the close of a $70 million funding round. Expanses provides information from its independent database to large organizations like PayPal, CVS, and the federal government to manage their assets connected to the public internet and do things like reduce an organization’s cyberattack vulnerability surface area.

In addition to IP addresses, Expanse tracks things like Domain Name System (DNS) protocol information and other registration record systems around the world to compile its database.

The $70 million series C round was led by TPG Growth with participation from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), IVP, and Founders Fund, and individual investors like Arianna Huffington, Peter Thiel, and Turner Enterprise CEO Taylor Glover.

Cofounders Tim Junio and Matt Kraning met when consulting DARPA for use of big data for projects related to the war in Afghanistan, then created Expanse and a number of other projects built on similar methods. Competitive-bid DARPA contracts led to the creation of Expanse’s internet sensing platform, and in 2015 the company began to raise funding and serve customers, Kraning told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

The company currently has more than $100 million in contracts with federal agencies like the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, U.S. Army, and U.S. Air Force, the company said in a statement.

Funding announced today will be used to grow Expanse’s sales, marketing, and engineering teams; grow its presence in markets around the world; and launch new features and products. Last year, Expanse grew to provide services to customers outside the United States for the first time, reaching Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Since large organizations are fundamentally distributed, it can be a challenge for them to get a complete, accurate view of all their assets, especially when factors like contractors or recent acquisitions enter the picture.

“There are all these things where a company has presence on the internet but centrally does not have a way to discover or manage what those additional assets are,” Kraning said. “And that puts them at high risk, because from a security perspective, you can’t protect what you don’t know about. And more than anything else, it also puts them at risk for governance and management issues, because they’re not having their policy applied uniformly or consistently across all their assets.”

Kraning expects similar difficulties in tracking an organization’s devices to become an issue for smaller companies in the future, not just for large Fortune 100 companies. SoftBank Group predicts that there will be one trillion devices connected to the internet by 2025.

Expanse has raised $135 million since the company was founded in 2012. Expanse currently has 150 employees and is based in San Francisco, with offices in Atlanta, New York, and Washington, D.C.