Security group CipherCloud raises $50m CipherCloud, a cyber security start up, has raised $50m to help it keep pace with the rapid move by businesses to the cloud, as venture capital money pours into the security industry. Transamerica Ventures, the VC arm of the insurance group Aegon, led the fundraising round as one of the many corporate VC companies eager to take stakes in a new generation of cyber security start-ups. Delta Partners and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and T-Ventures, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, also participated in the round that was at an undisclosed valuation. Pravin Kothari, CipherCloud's founder and chief executive, said the company had benefited from spotting the trend of businesses" moving their important data to cloud services when he started the company four years ago. We had an early mover advantage as the first company in cloud security. We saw that the weather was shifting," he said. Venture capital funding has flooded into cyber security this year, with the sector securing $1.2bn of venture investment by August, overtaking the $1.1bn raised for the whole of 2013, according to data collected by research firm PrivCo. Lookout, the San Francisco-based mobile security company, has raised the most with a $150m round in August including investment from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Corporate venture arms of financial companies including Citi Ventures and Wells Fargo-backed Norwest Venture Partners, as well as VC arms of technology and industrials companies, have all made investments in the sector. VCs are betting that the rise in cyber crime - and its increasing attention at board level - will lead to profits for cyber security companies that offer new technologies to defend data, which is increasingly stored outside of a company's own networks. CipherCloud secures more than 3,000 cloud apps, including Salesforce, Box and Office 365 and helps customers track who is accessing their data wherever it is being stored. It has 2m users, mainly concentrated in the US and western Europe. Paige Leidig, chief marketing officer, said the company has got most of its business from regulated industries. "Financial services, banking, healthcare, pharma, telecommunications and government agencies - all these folks are super sensitive to the data leaving their network and also highly regulated," he said. But he added the company had recently seen growth in retail and consumer goods. The last year has seen a series of high profile data breaches at US retailers, starting with Target at Thanksgiving 2013, where more than 40m customer credit card details were lost, and including Home Depot this year, which was the largest ever breach at a retailer.