The recent WannaCry ransomware attacks have reminded businesses that cybersecurity is more important than ever, which is good news for security providers such as CrowdStrike Inc., which today announced that it has raised a large $100 million Series D funding round.

The round was led by Accel, and it included existing investors CapitalG and Warburg Pincus, as well as new investors March Capital and Telstra. This brings CrowdStrike’s total funding to date to more than $256 million, and the company’s valuation is now more than $1 billion.

Founded in 2011, CrowdStrike claims to have been the first company to offer a cloud-native endpoint protection platform with its CrowdStrike Falcon product. The CrowdStrike Falcon platform is made up of a suite of protection tools that include antivirus, endpoint detection and response, threat hunting, cyber threat intelligence and more.

According to CrowdStrike, its tools are now used by more than 10 percent of Fortune 1000 companies, and it has seen a 476 percent year-over-year increase in endpoint protection subscriptions. CrowdStrike also boasted last week that its Falcon Prevent service was able block the sudden WannaCry malware attacks through its machine learning and behavioral Indicator of Attack layers, which spot unusual file activity before a system can be compromised.

“As organizations are looking to replace their antivirus with more effective and forward-looking solutions, CrowdStrike’s cloud-based endpoint protection platform has emerged as the clear choice for customers around the world, displacing many legacy technologies and next-generation AV point products,” CloudStrike Chief Executive and co-founder George Kurtz wrote in a blog post. “Equally important, we’ve proven that the SaaS business model allows us to maintain a competitive win rate ahead of the competition, while delivering unmatched value to our customers.”

Kurtz said that the new funding will allow CloudStrike to maintain what he calls the company’s “three key differentiators.” According to Kurtz, these include the strength of the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, CloudStrike’s position as a market leader, and CloudStrike’s continued product innovation in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and behavioral-based analytics.

“Perhaps, the greatest validation for our technology and innovation comes from the fact that we are the only security technology company in our space to have three long-standing customers invest in two consecutive funding rounds,” Kurtz concluded.

CloudStrike is not the only security company to benefit from the recent WannaCry attacks. Shares in cybersecurity companies got a boost over the weekend, with the industry collectively seeing an increase of $5.9 billion in early trading on Monday. Antivirus provider Symantec Corp. alone saw more than $750 million added to its market capitalization, and several other companies saw their shares rise by more than 3 percent.

Photo: CrowdStrike