Vendors are coming up with increasingly creative ways to tap the growing amounts of data on the web. BitSight Technologies Inc., for instance, aggregates information about hacker movements, exposed servers and other threats to track the online security landscape, an effort that attracted $40 million from investors last week.

The capital will help drive the adoption of the startup’s flagship risk ranking platform, which employs the data it collects to grade how well organizations protect themselves against attack. Insurance providers can use the service to determine whether it’s economically worthwhile to cover a company against hacking, while everyday enterprises are able to consult BitSight’s scores for a better understanding of their suppliers’ security. The startup helpfully provides a notification feature that makes it possible to quickly alert a vendor if its score starts to slip.

Giving companies better visibility into their IT operations is a goal that BitSight shares with Unravel Data Inc., which raised $7 million in funding last week to ease the monitoring of analytics environments. The startup sells a performance tracking tool designed to identify configuration issues, hardware inefficiencies and other problems that are slowing down processing. The software then uses machine learning algorithms to provide recommendations on how to speed things up . Unravel Data says that its offering works with most of the major technologies in the Hadoop ecosystem including Spark, HBase and Hive as well as complementary projects like Kafka.

Meanwhile in the mobile advertising space, Kochava Inc. is harnessing analytics to help brands understand how their promotions campaigns are received by smartphones and table owners.  The startup last week introduced a free edition of its service that gives marketers real-time visibility into key metrics such as the lifetime value of their users, return on investment and retention rates. The information can be used to segment a company’s audience and figure out the best way to target each subgroup.

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