McAfee, the cyber security company that was spun out of Intel earlier this year, has made its first major acquisition.

It has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Skyhigh Networks for an undisclosed amount, with the cloud security company’s CEO, Rajiv Gupta, set to run McAfee’s new cloud business unit.

A young company

“Skyhigh Networks had the foresight five years ago to realize that cybersecurity for cloud environments could not be an impediment to, or afterthought of, cloud adoption,” McAfee CEO, Chris Young, said.

“They pioneered an entirely new product category called cloud access security broker (CASB) that analysts describe as one of the fastest growing areas of information security investments of the last five years - where Skyhigh continues to innovate and lead.”

Skyhigh’s Gupta added: “Becoming part of McAfee is the ideal next step in realizing Skyhigh Networks’ vision of not simply making the cloud secure, but making it the most secure environment for business.

“McAfee will provide global scale to further accelerate Skyhigh’s growth, with the combined company providing leading technologies and solutions across cloud and endpoint security – categories Skyhigh and McAfee respectively helped create, and the two architectural control points for enterprise security.”

Skyhigh is believed to have raised $106 million in funding to date, with PitchBook estimating that its last funding round valued the company at $400m.

McAfee, meanwhile, was spun out of Intel in April 2017, but its former parent still holds some sway - Intel owns a 49 percent equity stake in McAfee, behind majority shareholder TPG Capital, a private equity firm which controls a 51 percent stake.

Fellow private equity firm Thoma Bravo is a minority investor through an agreement with TPG.