Asa Mathat
Andreessen Horowitz said on Sunday that it is taking a $90 million stake in enterprise management startup Tanium, with former Windows unit head Stephen Sinofsky joining the company’s board.
The company allows businesses to manage and secure the devices on their network via a Web browser.
“We love the opportunity to partner with enterprise companies that are either working to radically improve the way a given IT need is met with software — or transforming the IT landscape by re-creating or re-defining the traditional categories with unique software,” Sinofsky said in a blog post.
Tanium does both, Sinofsky said. On Twitter, he said that Tanium allows network administrators to learn about hundreds of thousands of devices in seconds, and to make changes at the same speed.
“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 said in the blog post.
Marc Andreessen touted the the investment in a post on Twitter, saying it is the first VC investment in the company since its 2007 funding.
“Collectively partners at @a16z have maybe 200 years experience in systems management,” Andreessen said in a seven-part Twitter post. “Tanium is a breakthrough like we’ve never seen.”
