Why Investors Are Showering Money On Skyhigh Networks Just 16 Months After It Launched

Only a year after investing $20 million into cloud security startup Skyhigh Networks, investors Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital are doubling down, pouring another $40 million in, Skyhigh announced today.

That brings the total invested in the young company, that launched its cloud service in February, 2013, to $66.5 million.

And Salesforce.com also joined the round.

The reason: Skyhigh Networks is making it safe for enterprise to buy software as a cloud-computing service.

It helps IT discover what the company calls "shadow IT." Those are cloud services that employees buy on their own, going around IT. Once discovered, it helps IT say yes to them by making sure employees are using them securely.

And if they aren't, Skyhigh will help IT find solutions to the problem by recommending "remediation," Skyhigh CEO Rajiv Gupta tells Business Insider.

That might be as simple as telling the employees to use the company's Box account, instead of their personal Box account. Or it might be as complicated as noticing weird behavior in an employee's Salesforce.com account that indicates a hacker.

"This is about a cultural change. CIOs are using Skyhigh to bring the MoJo for IT back. IT needs to be in the loop for [cloud service use] and in many cases, it's not," Gupta says.

Hence, CIOs are coming to Skyhigh to watch how employees are using the cloud. So far, the company has landed over 200 enterprises customers, it says, and revenues grew by 362%. The company has tripled the number of employees since it came out of stealth, too, to 133 people.

It helps that Gupta and cofounder Sekhar Sarukkai have a long successful history together. This is their third company. Confluent Software was bought by Oblix for an undisclosed sum in 2004. Securent sold to Cisco for $100 million in 2007.