UK network security startup Darktrace has just raised $18 million from investors from Invoke Capital, Talis Capital and Hoxton Ventures, in a round that takes its valuation to some $80 million, according to the company.

Darktrace, which has previously been backed by former Autonomy founder Mike Lynch’s Invoke Capital, says it will use the new cash to fund its expansion into the Asia-Pacific region.

The company, founded in 2013, calls itself the leader in “Enterprise Immune System Technology”, and offers a product based on machine learning and mathematics algorithms developed at the UK’s University of Cambridge. The software is able to tackle the most “advanced” kinds of cyber threats, no matter if these are external or insider attacks, by detecting previously unseen risks in real-time, the company claims.

Darktrace says its security analytics software is: “Based on the biological principles of the human immune system, Darktrace’s technology is capable of learning ‘self’ – what constitutes the normal pattern of life for the organisation, its users and devices – and detecting subtle deviations from this normal behaviour, which suggest a compromise, breach or cyber-attack.”

In a nutshell, Darktrace sells a kind of monitoring tool that sits in your network and ‘listens’ to everything that passes through it. It makes sense of all the traffic and flags anything suspicious so IT managers can take a closer look. It also offers a regular “Threat Intelligence Report” for IT staff to contemplate.

It’s certainly a very different approach from traditional cyber security methods, which normally rely on rule-based algorithms and go by the theory that the best way to protect yourself is to put your network behind a wall. That may have worked in the old days, but with hackers becoming increasingly sophisticated and network behaviour becoming increasingly more complex, it’s becoming more difficult for companies to stay one step ahead.

Hoxton partner Hussein Kanji told Forbes that Darktrace was now “the fastest growing cyber security firm in Europe”, based on the number of new subscriptions. He told the website that new corporate subscriptions, which start at $5,000 a month and go up to several hundred thousand dollars per month, were coming in faster than those of rival cyber security firm FireEye.

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