Insight Partners does most of its investing through growth-stage funding rounds, but the venture capital giant occasionally makes bigger bets as well. The firm today announced that it has acquired threat intelligence startup Recorded Future Inc. for a hefty $780 million.

The transaction is the third nine-figure acquisition that the cybersecurity industry has seen this week. On Wednesday, Palo Alto Networks Inc. bought container protection specialist Twistlock Inc. for $410 million along with a second, smaller startup called PureSec. A day earlier, FireEye Inc. picked up network monitoring provider Verodin Inc. in a $250 million deal.

Recorded Future is not only the biggest of this week’s buyouts but also sets an industry milestone. According to Insight Partners, which led the startup’s most recent funding round in 2017, the deal marks the largest-ever threat intelligence acquisition.

Boston-based Recorded Future provides enterprise security teams with information about online threats. The startup’s cloud platform aggregates data from sources such as the CVE system, a U.S. government-funded database of software vulnerabilities, as well as natural-language information. That includes posts on hacker forums, news articles, tweets and other relevant items in over 40 languages.

Recorded Future meshes all this information together to create profiles about the various threats lurking on the web. The startup has amassed a repository of more than 300 million profiles about malicious IP addresses, malware strands and other items of interest for network protection teams.

Recorded Future claims its platform is used by 35,000 security professionals across 400-plus companies. Among them are major enterprises such as Intel Corp., Morgan Stanley Inc. and British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC.

As part of the acquisition, Insight Partners is buying out all of Recorded Future’s other shareholders except for insiders such as founding Chief Executive Christopher Ahlberg. In addition, Xconomy reported that the firm will inject an undisclosed amount of operating capital directly into the startup’s coffers.

“Our leadership team will remain in place, our corporate structure will remain intact, and you should expect minimal impact from this change in financial sponsorship,” Ahlberg wrote in a blog post. “This new financial sponsorship means that we will be able to accelerate our plans and even more aggressively pursue new features and capabilities in existing and adjacent markets.”

Recorded Future raised $57.9 million in funding prior to the acquisition. In addition to Insight Partners, it was backed by Alphabet Inc.’s GV venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, MassMutual Ventures and a number of others.

Image: Recorded Future