Now it just has to prove that such an industry exists-before its business is swallowed up or squashed by Google, the company that made its success possible in the first place. With carriers such as T-Mobile, Orange and Deutsche Telekom now preloading Lookout on some or all of their Android phones, and Sprint to come later in 2013, Lookout seems poised to own the consumer smartphone security industry. (Hering describes that number only as "concretely within the ballpark.")
Thanks to what it says is a high single-digit percentage of users that upgrade to its paid version, the company has raised $76.5 million in rounds led by Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Accel Partners, drawing murmurs of a billion-dollar valuation. Hering and his two cofounders have amassed more than 30 million mobile users-close to 20 million more than either of those competitors-with more than a million added every month. "We actually built a security product that people want to use," says Hering. It was born in a different era, when free mobile apps proliferate through word of mouth, not crapware PC installations by computer makers and ads for shrink-wrapped software. Instead, the startup has wooed users with a slick interface and free features like data backups and find-my-phone tools. But as the computing world shifts from PCs to mobile devices, Lookout has been able to trounce multibillion-dollar security giants like McAfee and Symantec without scaring people. Fear, or the deliverance from it, has always been a huge selling point for antivirus software.