Today, Accenture announced it has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Dragos, committing $3.2 billion to strengthen critical infrastructure defense. This is a landmark moment — not just for Dragos, but for the entire field of operational technology (OT) cybersecurity. For me personally, it is also deeply meaningful. I have been with founder and CEO Rob Lee and the Dragos team since they began selling to their first customers, and watching this company grow from a napkin term sheet to one of the most consequential cybersecurity companies in the world is something I will carry with me for a long time.
I want to share why we invested, what we saw in Rob and his team, and why I believe this outcome, as significant as it is, is really just the beginning.
A Category Nobody Was Paying Attention To
When Rob and I first met, roughly eight years ago at the Rosewood (a bit too bourgeois by Rob’s own admission!), industrial cybersecurity was not a category that most investors understood or cared about. The conventional wisdom in venture capital was that OT security was a niche, markets were slow, customers were hard to sell to, and margins would disappoint. Rob had pitched to a bunch of investors before we sat down together. Most told him to move to the Valley. Several told him to pivot to cloud or blockchain.
I saw it differently, and my perspective was shaped by something most investors on Sand Hill Road lacked: I had been inside those facilities. My father made his living installing electrostatic precipitators in power plants. I visited those plants as a child, back in India, where I grew up. I understood, in a physical and visceral way, what it meant to keep industrial infrastructure running, and what it would mean if it went down.
When Rob walked me through his vision for Dragos, something clicked immediately. Here was a founder with deep technical credibility from his time at the NSA and Air Force, who had spent years building specialized knowledge in exactly the domain that was about to become critically important: the security of the operational technology systems that run power grids, oil and gas refineries, water treatment facilities, manufacturing plants, and data centers. The attack surface was massive. The defenders were almost nonexistent. And virtually no one in venture capital was taking it seriously.
What Made Rob Different
I have backed many founders over the years. What I look for is not the most polished pitch deck or the most detailed financial model. I look for founders who are genuinely driven by the problem — who cannot imagine doing anything else.
Rob is one of those founders. His mission stemmed from a formative experience doing humanitarian work with Engineers Without Borders in Cameroon. He watched a mother in the fields whose only hope for her child was a wind turbine and a car battery charging LED lights at night — so that the child could study after sunset. When Rob learned that adversaries around the world wanted to deny those systems to civilian populations, it ignited something in him that never went away. He was not building a cybersecurity company. He was fighting for the right of every family, everywhere, to have safe, reliable infrastructure.
That mission resonates deeply with how we think about investing at Canaan. Over the years, we have backed companies in healthcare and biotech — Arvinas, Halda, Day One, whose work has saved and will save countless lives. When you are securing a power plant or a water treatment facility, you are not protecting data. You are protecting people.
Building in a Non-Consensus Market
One of the harder things about backing Dragos early was that the company's model looked unconventional by traditional SaaS standards. Rob insisted on combining software with a professional services team and a threat intelligence operation — so Dragos would not just sell a product but serve as a true partner to its customers, many of whom had never navigated an OT security journey before.
Rob repeatedly received the following feedback: "Your margins will be off. Just be cloud SaaS." But Rob's instinct was right: in a nascent, underserved market, you cannot hand a customer a product and walk away. You have to educate, handhold, and prove value over time. That services-and-intelligence model became one of Dragos's greatest competitive advantages, giving them sticky customer relationships and a proprietary dataset on OT threats that no competitor could replicate. Rob literally created the course on industrial security at SANS — he was educating the entire market while building his company.
Fast Forward: A Market That Caught Up
Eight years ago, industrial cybersecurity was an afterthought. In today’s world, protecting critical national infrastructure — electric grids, oil and gas pipelines, water systems, manufacturing facilities, data centers — is among the top priorities for governments, enterprises, and security teams worldwide.
The threat environment has moved faster than most anticipated.
Dragos's own 2026 OT/ICS Cybersecurity Report found that adversaries are no longer simply gaining access to industrial networks and waiting. They are actively mapping control loops, learning how physical processes operate, and positioning for operational disruption. Three new threat groups targeting critical infrastructure were identified in the last year alone. Ransomware impacted more than 3,300 industrial organizations in 2025 — a 49 percent increase from the year before. As the world moves toward more autonomous hardware, such as robots and cars, this problem is only going to get worse.
Dragos built for exactly this moment. What looked non-consensus in 2018 is now indisputable. And Dragos is the clear market leader.
What Comes Next
It would be easy to frame this acquisition as the end of the story. It is not. The transaction preserves Dragos's permanence, autonomy, and mission in the long run. Rob’s point of view is clear: "This thing outlives all of us. How do we make sure it is still doing the mission in 100 years?" Accenture gets it. They are a visionary partner.
I believe Dragos is on a trajectory to become one of the main pillars of the United States' national security infrastructure and, increasingly, of the world's. "Safeguarding civilization" was their motto when they were a handful of people with an audacious vision. A decade later, with the scale of Accenture behind them, the words carry more weight than ever.
A Final Word
It is bittersweet to exit a company like this. Canaan's funds are time-limited, and returning capital to our LPs is part of our commitment. But if our fund could go on indefinitely, I would have kept investing in Dragos.
To Rob and the entire Dragos team: congratulations. What you have built matters. And the best, I am convinced, is still ahead.