Brazilian Antivirus Startup PSafe Raises $30M Series C From China’s Qihoo 360 And Redpoint e.ventures

Brazilian antivirus startup PSafe announced a $30 million Series C investment round today. Chinese antivirus company Qihoo 360 led the round with a $25 million investment, and existing investors Redpoint e.ventures and Pinnacle Ventures returned to contribute another $5 million. PSafe is a free antivirus software for the Brazilian market, with 30 million installs to date, and heavy initial adoption among Brazil’s B and C middle classes. It runs in the background and updates on its own so users never have to worry about whether they’re running the current version. PSafe also offers unlimited free cloud storage to backup users’ hard files. Founder and CEO Marco de Mello (pictured) calls it the “don’t talk to me” antivirus. “I think people are starting to realize, ‘why pay for something when I get mediocre service, if I can get something better for free,’” de Mello says. “It’s better and free.” PSafe has 20 million average monthly users and no revenue. But de Mello, a Spotrunner veteran and former director of Microsoft Windows Security, says he’s in the business of building trust, not revenue – for now. De Mello says the company’s focus is to reach 100 million users and is planning for the milestone with an app, content and game store that will live within the PSafe interface. PSafe has no direct Brazilian competitors, but international antivirus heavyweights AVG, Avast, McAfee and Symantec all operate in Brazil. De Mello cites a cultural advantage, saying it’s the only one with free Portuguese support, 24/7. De Mello plans on using the growth capital “on tech build-out, obviously,” and on scaling to 100 million users. But he’s planning more holistically than a cost-per-acquisition campaign, designating the lion’s share of his user acquisition budget to awareness marketing. “We need to educate users about what they’re facing every day in Brazil when they pick up their Android phone or log on to Windows.” PSafe’s database goes back almost three years and includes 7.3 billion different threat signatures. The software detects about 70,000 new threats per day, and announces some of them in Portuguese at @PSafeTecnologia. The top-level threats are cyber theft and financial attacks against individuals, followed by more coordinated attacks that take over a lot of machines at once to attack a bigger target without users knowing their computers are infected. “That’s part of the awareness I’m trying to drive,” de Mello says. “If you don’t secure your machine