The private equity firm LLR Partners on Monday said it has acquired a cyber security business unit from Northrop Grumman [NOC] and has renamed the business BluVector.
LLR said it has committed $50 million to BluVector to support the acquisition and future growth plans. The deal closed on Dec. 30, 2016. Under Northrop Grumman the business unit was called Acuity Solutions Corporation.
LLR said that BluVector will operate as a stand-alone business, led by its CEO Kris Lovejoy. Lovejoy was president of the business unit within Northrop Grumman.
BluVector uses machine learning to provide network-based Advanced Threat Detection and reduce response times from months to minutes. A spokeswoman for LLR told Defense Daily via an email response to questions that BluVector has sold about 75 appliances to customers, which are split equally between commercial and government. Now the company plans to target more commercial customers in sectors such as healthcare, financial services and retail, she said.
“As part of Northrop Grumman, we were able to create truly innovative threat hunting capabilities and disrupt the market,” Lovejoy said in a statement. “Emerging as a standalone business now gives BluVector the opportunity to extend our leadership position in both existing and emerging security sectors. Partnering with LLR brings to the equation a keen understanding of the cyber market and the resources to help us accelerate growth in the commercial space.”
Northrop Grumman, like several other major defense contractors including Boeing [BA], General Dynamics [GD] and Lockheed Martin [LMT], divested its commercial cyber security business to focus on complex solutions for its government customers. Raytheon [RTN] maintains a commercial cyber security business that it expanded in 2015 with the acquisition of Websense.
Northrop Grumman said in a statement that it “continues to focus on building its global leadership in large-scale, government-focused, full-spectrum cyber capabilities.”
Brian Radic, vice president at LLR Partners, said in a statement that “BluVector’s technology is highly scalable and easy to integrate with disparate security solutions, giving enterprises a holistic to help defend against all forms of malware, both known and unknown.”