Lookout snares $150M to build out massive anti-malware network for mobile devices

Things are really looking up for mobile security player Lookout.

Lookout, based in San Francisco, has raised $150 million from a bevy of well known investors, it announced Wednesday, including lead T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Goldman Sachs, and Bezos Expeditions.

Lookout’s Whole Population Security Analytics solution is proactive. It takes a predictive approach to make what the company executives call automated decision making to engage malware or intrusions before they penetrate your mobile device. Or worse.

Lookout’s offering is what security researchers call a one-stop-shop approach; that is, it identifies threats before they reach and breach your moat, analyzes the threat, predicts in real-time the DNA of the malware, and then, hopefully, liquidates it.

While some solutions hype one of more facets of a threat, Lookout execs say their formula encompasses everything needed to keep your mobile device functioning safely, crucial as more people use their personal smartphones to connect to company networks.

“Every user that joins and installs Lookout contributes to that network. It contributes threat intelligence and data about the threats to help make the world safer,” said founder John Hering.

Previous investors, including Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, and Andreesen Horowitz, also participated in this sixth round of funding since Lookout launched in 2007.

Lookout, with 250 employees and offices in London and Tokyo, previously raised $130 million in venture funding. Lookout was founded by Hering and a group of former computer students at USC. To date, over 50 million consumers are using Lookout’s mobile security offerings. Lookout’s solution comes embedded in mobile phones sold by AT&T and T-Mobile, for example.

With the future of computing rapidly coming down to mobile devices and away from desktops, Lookout is, without question, in the right place at the right time.

“We saw what was emerging very early, what we saw as the next generation of computing, which was mobile phones and tablets. We looked at that as an opportunity to really rethink what a cyber security company would look like,” said Hering.

“When you look at the PC era, as more PCs came online, the world got less safe,” he said.