Lookout (company) - Lookout Premium

Lookout (previously known as Flexilis) is a San Francisco-based mobile security company. It provides security to both private and business mobile devices.

Company overview

Lookout is a mobile security firm started by graduates of the University of Southern California. The original name of the company was Flexilis. In 2005, the firm showed the vulnerabilities of smartphones to hacking via Bluetooth, in addition to other problems in mobile security. In 2009 Khosla Ventures provided $5.5 million in funding to the company as it began developing mobile security software. The programs were initially tested on Android and Windows devices, before expanding to Blackberry and iPhone devices. The software was intended to protect mobile devices from malicious programs, as well as allowing users to back up and delete data from their devices. The co-founders of Flexilis and Lookout are John Hering, who serves as Lookout's executive chairman, James Burgess, and Kevin Mahaffey. The principal research analyst for the company until 2014 was Marc Rogers. Jim Dolce serves as the company's CEO.

Lookout was in use by about ten million devices within a year and a half after its official launch in 2009. As of late 2013, the company had raised $131 million in venture capital and was valued at about $1 billion. Previous investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners, Deutsche Telekom, and Index Ventures. Its security software had about 45 million users as of October 2013. This was about three times the downloads of other companies producing mobile security software and included pre-loads from telecom carriers like Sprint, Orange Mobile, and T-Mobile.

In August 2014 the company raised $150 million in series F financing. This brought the total of financing the firm has received is $280 million. In October the company signed a partnership agreement with KDDI in Japan. In November of that year they hired Aaron Cockerill as VP of Enterprise Product and David Helfer as VP of Worldwide Channel Development. That month the company released the first evidence of malware and spam in Android smart phones, encountering the NotCompatible malicious software in 2012, and showed that at least four million mobile users may have encountered it since. In 2014 the company was also the first to detect the MalApp.D, a VoIP software-based malware.

Software

The firm produces mobile security apps for iOS and Android devices. The free edition is upgradeable to a premium version which includes a phishing and malicious website blocker, privacy advisor, photo and call history backup, device-to-device data transfer, remote locking and wiping, and support services. The software also includes the ability to remotely snap a photograph of the phone's environment when lost or stolen, which can help to identify the thief or location of the device. In June 2014 the company released an app that produces real-time theft alerts, including a "theftie"--photograph of the thief taken automatically by the device--when certain actions are taken, such as a mistyped phone code. The software bundle also comes with a utility called "sign al flare", which automatically flags the location of a phone once the battery starts to die, so that the device user can later ping its last known location.

In 2013 AT&T partnered with Lookout to bundle its security apps with all of its mobile devices and tablets, and to take a portion of the profit from any premium upgrade purchased by its customers. In 2014 the firm released its "privacy toolkit" software program, which adapts legal documents into short-form privacy policies for website users and app developers, by walking a developer or lawyer through a series of questions that help them shorten and simplify their privacy policies. The firm also produces surveys and studies of mobile security issues, including annual "encounter rates" of mobile devices with malware, and the rise of chargeware on mobile devices. In July 2013, they determined a security flaw in Google Glass, for example, that could allow hackers to defraud wearers of the device through the insertion of malicious code. That year it also estimated that about one million Android devices had encountered problems with adware. This included the BadNews malware found in Google apps, which Lookout discovered and developed support for in spring 2013.

The Wall Street Journal has described the cloud software as combining "[M]achine learning and contextual analytics to protect mobile devices from malicious applications .... The software, which uses machine intelligence technology, analyzes an app’s executable code, the IP address the device is accessing and several other traits to verify the software’s integrity. Each app on the device is cross checked with millions of data points Lookout has culled from more than six million mobile apps running on 50 million devices. Carriers preinstalled a consumer version, called Lookout Mobile Security, on smartphones sold to consumers."

Recognition

Lookout was noted in CNET's favorite Android Apps by CNET blogger Scott Webster in July 2011. CNET readers selected Lookout as their number three favorite Android app. In September 2011, the firm was listed in VentureWire's 2011 FASTech 50: Most Innovative Technology Startups. PC Magazine also gave it an Editor's Choice award.