Engineering a $3.2B exit with Dragos

Why We Invested

When Dragos founder and CEO Rob Lee describes his company's mission as "Safeguarding Civilization," he means it literally. Dragos protects the operational technology (OT) infrastructure that keeps modern society running: the industrial control systems behind power grids, water treatment facilities, oil pipelines, and manufacturing plants. These are the systems that, if disrupted by a cyberattack, don't just crash a website. They can shut off the lights for millions of people, compromise a city's drinking water, or halt critical production. That mission is what drew WestCap in.

Our conviction rested on three things:

1. A critical, underserved category. OT and industrial control system cybersecurity is one of the most critical and underserved categories in security. These systems have long been treated as separate from traditional enterprise IT, and they are not well-defended.
   
2. A durable, proprietary edge. Dragos's visibility into adversary behavior in OT environments isn't easily replicated. It was built by practitioners with deep U.S. intelligence and military backgrounds, including the founder and CEO himself.
   
3. A mission-driven founder. We believed Dragos's founder was building something well beyond a software company. "Safeguarding Civilization" is the lens through which every product, partnership, and hiring decision at Dragos gets made.

WestCap led the company's Series D extension, investing based on our conviction in the category, the technology, and the team.

What "Operating Equity" Actually Looks Like

Firms often describe themselves as value-added investors. WestCap defines value-add differently. Our Operating Equity® model is built on the premise that the most differentiated thing we bring to a company is not capital. It is a team of seasoned operators, embedded at the working level, running alongside the founders and management teams we back.

At Dragos, that meant sustained engagement across nearly every function of the business:

Talent and leadership. Our team invested years in building a genuine trust relationship with the founder and CEO. That relationship let us lead a full rebuild of the management team, including placing new finance and marketing leadership, facilitating executive offsites, and providing ongoing coaching to the founder. When a founder trusts you with the people around him, that's not a transaction. It's a partnership.

Commercial access. We opened doors in the Middle East and supported Dragos's federal go-to-market strategy, creating market access that directly advanced the company's growth agenda. We also took on a more unusual mandate: building Dragos's insurance commercial strategy from scratch. Through relationships with Marsh and others in the OT cyber-insurance ecosystem, we positioned Dragos as the category leader in an area that's only growing in strategic importance.

Go-to-market. We provided sustained GTM support throughout the investment, identifying commercial opportunities and keeping close watch on competitive dynamics in the OT market. At one point, a member of our team stepped in as acting head of revenue operations, providing organizational support that made a genuine difference inside the sales function.

Customer success. Our team partnered with Dragos to build its customer success strategy from the ground up, working directly with service leadership on time-to-value initiatives, coaching at internal offsites, and helping the organization develop the operational discipline needed to scale its customer base. Retention and growth, addressed together, at the same time.

AI capability. Our team worked directly with Dragos's engineering leadership to accelerate AI capability and literacy inside the company. Hands-on sessions with technical leaders helped Dragos move faster on one of the most strategically important dimensions of its platform evolution.

Brand and marketing. Our in-house creative team delivered sustained brand and marketing work over the life of the investment, including brand strategy and voice development, growth marketing strategy, and ongoing executive advisory. This work helped Dragos sharpen how it communicated its mission in an increasingly crowded market.

Corporate Development. We worked closely with the Dragos team to hone its M&A strategy: evaluating the OT cybersecurity competitive landscape, identifying potential acquisition targets, and conducting thorough due diligence and valuation analysis on key opportunities. This work contributed to the transformative acquisitions for the business, including Phosphorus and Network Perception.

Trust Compounds

Partway through the investment, a secondary opportunity arose at a meaningful discount to the most recent primary round price. We moved decisively, and we were able to because of the trust and information advantage we'd earned inside Dragos over the life of the relationship. That decision meaningfully amplified the outcome for our investors. It was the product of a relationship built through real work, not just a term sheet.

The Exit

The company's momentum culminated in an acquisition by Accenture, who agreed to acquire a majority stake at a $3.25 billion valuation representing a substantial premium to the company's most recent prior mark. Accenture will bring its customers and decades of trusted relationships and deep expertise to help Dragos scale and secure more critical infrastructure and physical operations globally.

The Model

Our Operating Equity model is a repeatable process:

• Build a great thesis. Conviction in a critical, underserved category before it's obvious.
• Back visionary, mission-driven founders. Operators building well beyond a software company.
• Earn access at advantaged terms, because of what we bring operationally, not just what we deploy financially.
• Build trust with founders and lean in heavily. Get into the building and do real work.

These things compound. This is what it looks like when they do. The rest of our portfolio has been built the same way, and we expect to be telling similar stories in the months and years ahead.

WestCap is built to build.

The WestCap and Dragos teams in Times Square, NYC, June 2026