Alongside the wave of acquisitions that took place in the past few weeks, the cybersecurity industry has seen a number of startups raise substantial funding rounds. Today, Vectra AI Inc. became the latest to join the fray after announcing that it has closed a fresh $100 million investment.

Early Facebook Inc. and Netflix Inc. investor TCV led the Series E round. The growth equity firm was joined by all nine of Vectra’s existing backers, including Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures.

San Jose, California-based Vectra provides enterprise security teams with metadata that they can use to catch breaches faster. The startup’s Cognito platform analyzes the traffic flowing through a company’s network and extracts hundreds of technical details that help light on suspicious behavior. Its artificial intelligence algorithms also add in any additional items of interest they find, such as if a certain system is communicating with an unknown server.

Vectra has built a pair of tools atop Cognito to help administrators put this data to use. The first, Cognito Recall, is an AI-assisted “investigative workbench” for getting to the bottom of security breaches. It provides administrators with pointers on where they should start looking for suspicious behavior and visualizes the metadata generated by Cognito to ease analysis.

The other tool, Cognito Detect, takes an entirely automated approach to threat identification. It can spot rootkits, backdoors, attempts to access administrators’ accounts and other types of attacks, even if hackers use methods such as encryption to hide their tracks.

Cognito’s extensive feature set has helped Vectra stand out in the crowded security landscape. The startup saw recurring revenues rise an impressive 104% in 2018, growth that it plans to accelerate with the new funding by stepping up sales and product development efforts.

Vectra is led by Chief Executive Hitesh Sheth, a former chief operating officer at Aruba Networks Inc. and onetime head of Juniper Networks Inc.’s switch business. Chief Technology Officer Oliver Tavakoli also ran technical operations for Juniper’s security division. The leadership team’s credentials are likely among the main reasons Vectra has managed to win the support of big-name investors such as TCV.

Vectra has raised more than $220 million in funding to date.

Sheth talked about the company’s strategy early last year while announcing its last fundraising on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio:

Photo: Vectra