Tanium, a powerful IT management tool, gets $90M from Andreessen

Andreessen Horowitz is betting big on Tanium, a company that lets IT professionals manage hundreds of thousands of devices in real-time.

The venture capital firm is investing $90 million in Tanium, co-founder and general partner Marc Andreessen announced on Twitter tonight. The investment values the company at $900 million, sources (which we’ll pretend aren’t connected to any of the firms involved) tell the Wall Street Journal.

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https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/480849412596322305

You’ve likely never heard of Tanium, but its technology sounds like an IT manager’s dream. Founded by David Hindawi and his son Orion, Tanium gives IT folks unprecedented awareness of all the devices connected to their network, which is helpful for both security and general management.

You can also type in natural language queries in Tanium’s console — for example, you can ask for all computers running a specific process — and get results in a few seconds, according to Andreessen partner (and former Microsoft executive) Steven Sinofsky, who’s also joining Tanium’s board.

“In practice, the Tanium team accomplished nothing short of a complete rethinking of how IT pros manage, secure, and maintain the endpoints in their network — every node on the network can now be interrogated, managed, updated, and secured, instantly from a browser,” Sinofsky wrote in a blog post today.

While there are plenty of IT management tools already on the market (including BigFix, which the Orion’s previously founded and eventually sold to IBM in 2010), Tanium sounds like it offers more breadth and speed than the competition. And as someone who used to work in IT, the idea of having instant access to hundreds of thousands of devices on my network sounds unimaginable.

The investment is Tanium’s first from a VC firm since its founding in 2007, and it’s also Andreessen’s second-largest investment ever. The company says it will use the new funds toward continued product development and expansion.

“When we talk about Tanium we describe it as an entrepreneur “trifecta,” Sinofsky wrote. “First, David and Orion are experienced and successful entrepreneurs. Second, Tanium is a product that builds on innovative and inventive technology that could only come about from a team with experience and depth of understanding the enterprise. And third, Tanium is already a successful and profitable company with dozens of customers in massive, mission-critical, and global deployments.”