Marble Security

About Marble Security

Marble Security, founded by serial entrepreneur Dave Jevans in 2005, established itself as a provider of mobile threat intelligence and defense before its acquisition by Proofpoint in August 2015. Jevans, a cybersecurity veteran with over 20 years of experience and 17 US patents, previously founded and sold other security startups like IronKey and Receipt.com, bringing a wealth of industry knowledge to Marble's operations. The company, which also went by the name Ironkey, secured $34.6 million in funding over two rounds from investors including Bridgescale, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Crosslink Capital.

The firm specialized in protecting enterprises from mobile security risks originating from malicious and privacy-leaking applications on both Android and iOS devices. It targeted enterprise clients navigating the security complexities of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) and corporate-owned, personally-enabled (COPE) environments. The business model centered on providing threat intelligence as a service, identifying risks like data leakage, credential theft, and advanced persistent threats (APTs) that often begin with seemingly harmless apps, termed 'riskware'. This service was designed to integrate directly with mobile device management (MDM) and enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions, offering a layer of security to manage mobile app risks.

Marble Security's core product was a mobile security platform, which included the AppHawk service. This platform was powered by Marble Labs, a dedicated research and response team that analyzed millions of applications to score them against over a thousand potentially malicious behaviors. The service provided an administrative console with a dashboard view of app risk across the enterprise, allowing IT administrators to set risk thresholds, create blacklists and whitelists, and receive alerts. If a risky app was detected, the system could automatically quarantine the device or deny it access to corporate resources until the threat was remediated. Following its acquisition, Marble Security's technology and its team of nearly 20 employees were integrated into Proofpoint, and its offering was rebranded as Proofpoint TAP Mobile Defense.