Cybersecurity platform provider Cybereaon, Inc. has raised $59 million Series C in a round led surprisingly by Japan’s Softbank Group Corp. — surprising, as the company had previously announced that it was getting out of the venture capital business.

Charles River Ventures and California-based Spark Capital are also reported to have participated in the round.

Founded in 2012 and with offices in Israel and Boston, Cybereason offers an automated endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform that identifies elements of cyber attacks for effective response in real time.

The company’s EDR platform detects in real-time both signature and non-signature-based attacks and accelerates incident investigation and response, connecting together individual pieces of evidence to form a complete picture of a malicious operation.

Along with the real-time detection of cyber-attacks, the platform delivers enhanced investigation of attacks and continuous endpoint visibility.

The service it implemented via Cybereason’s “Malop Hunting Engine,” a Big Data analytics platform that has been designed to reveal malicious operations; the engine is said to receive, in real time, data collected from all the Silent Sensors.

All received data is signed and stored for research, with the data then flowing through an in-memory graph where machine learning behavioral models search for anomalies and other risks, in order to reveal unknown non-signature based attacks.

Softbank’s involvement in the round will see Cybereason expand into Japan, as Chief Executive Officer and Cofounder Lior Div told Haaretz: “We invested two years only developing technology that hadn’t existed. We began doing business in the final quarter of 2014 and since then we’ve expanded significantly… Now we want to do something in Japan with Softbank, which is the biggest software distributor in the country.”

Another IDF win

It nearly goes without saying that the moment a startup has been founded or has its roots in Israel, you look for the phrase Israel Defense Forces Unit 8200, and Cybereason is no exception.

Unit 8200 is an Israeli Intelligence Corps unit responsible for collecting signal intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption, but it’s not what the unit itself does that makes it significant in terms of tech startups, it’s the quality of its alumni that makes it remarkable; it’s hard to keep track of how many tech startups have been founded by people who served in the unit but an incomplete list includes Check Point, ICQ, Palo Alto Networks, indeni, NICE, AudioCodes, Gilat, Leadspace, EZchip, Onavo, Singular, and CyberArk.

Including the new round, Cybereason has raised $88.6 million to-date. The only previous investor who did not participate in the new round was Lockheed Martin.

The company said in addition to expanding its operations to Japan it would use the new funding to triple its workforce.

Image credit: Cybereason.