Mountain View, Calif.-based cybersecurity startup Awake Security has retreated from the shadows after over two years with the announcement of $31 million in fresh funding from investors Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. An initial $8.7 million from Greylock and $22.5 million later provided by Bain brings the company’s total funding to $31.2 million to date.
The nearly three-year-old company was founded by a team of alumni from several established tech and cybersecurity companies such as HP, CipherCloud, Cylance, FireEye and VMware. The news comes as the first press mention of Awake Security’s existence outside of a brief note in Forbes this April.
Awake Security, launched out of a Greylock incubator and co-founded by former Greylock entrepreneur in residence Michael Callahan, leverages big data and machine learning in order to help corporate security teams defend their networks. Before founding Awake Security, the CEO held positions as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at big data infrastructure company PolyServe, which sold to HP in 2007 in a deal speculated to be worth nine figures.
The Silicon Valley tech player offers a patent-pending Security Knowledge Graph data model that is built to “identify and track network entities as humans think of them and highlights entity attributes, behaviors and activities,” so to proactively detect, hunt, investigate and response to threats.
"We're supercharging the ability of analysts to answer the questions they need to answer every day," Callahan told Fortune. "When you install this thing it's like turning the lights on—all the creepy crawlies taking advantage of the dark are now suddenly visible."
The startup will compete with a wave of new next-gen security startups including U.K.-based Darktrace, with a recent $75 million in funding, along with players such as Protectwise and Vectra Networks.
