As if more proof was required of investors’ enthusiasm towards cybersecurity, Distil Networks Inc. has raised $21 million in funding this morning to help expand the development and marketing of its anti-bot technology amid equally fast-growing interest from the enterprise. However, it doesn’t quite fit into the profile of the startups that have been getting most of the venture capital in that space lately.

Distil operates a long way from Silicon Valley, at Arlington County in Virginia, and focuses on helping organizations protect their sites rather than internal data as Illumio Inc., Palerra Inc. and its other recently funded peers do. In a time when only an estimated 41 percent of online activity is coming from humans, its service promises to fill an important gap.

The crux of the value proposition is a bot detector that be deployed either in the cloud on Distil’s content delivery network or behind the firewall as a dedicated appliance that filters incoming traffic for automated requests. That’s a simple enough setup that can prove useful for a surprisingly wide range of different purposes.

Blocking spam bots, automated click fraud other manner of malicious activity is only the tip of the iceberg. The most interesting use that Distil is touting for the technology is helping organizations prevent analytic services employed by their competitors from pulling important details such as product prices off their websites. That feature will only become more appealing as data continues to grow more entwined with decision-making in the enterprise.

The potential is apparently  evident for Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), which led the new $21 million round. Existing backers Foundry Group, TechStars, ff Venture Capital, Idea Fund and Correlation Ventures also contributed to the round, bringing Distil’s total raised to a healthy $48 million. BVP’s David Cowan, who co-founded online authentication giant VeriSign Inc. and two other major security companies,, is joining the startup’s board as part of the investment.

Photo via Brian Klug