Behavioral security analytics startup Cyberhaven Inc. today launched its main product with the announcement of $13 million in funding to further boost product development.

The Series A round was led by Vertex Ventures and Costanoa Ventures and included Crane Venture Partners along with a number of individual investors. The company was founded in 2015 by a team of five security researchers, all of whom hold Ph.D.s and have held research positions at Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the University of California at Berkeley.

Cyberhaven’s Data Behavior Analytics solution is designed to be a new approach to protecting business-critical data. The software-as-a-service product has a particular focus on providing complete visibility into the behavior and movement of corporate trade secrets such as intellectual property and client data across cloud and on-premise environments. The solution observes and analyzes behavior instead of relying on policies alone to control its flow, in theory providing users the ability to understand data loss and reduce the time it takes to detect and address incidents.

Cyberhaven DaBA is said to differ from data loss prevention and cloud access security broker tools by not requiring any changes to a company’s data, applications, cloud services or other information technology infrastructure, nor does it require policy creation or data classification to deploy. It’s a bold claim, but the company said its solution can analyze and record the flow of data across all sectors and detect suspected incidents, alerting security teams in the process.

The technology behind the solution already has support, with the initial research having been awarded more than $1 million in grants from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Swiss government.

“A recurring theme we’ve heard from hundreds of chief information security officers is that when a data incident occurs, it takes too much manual work to understand what happened with the data — and this wasted time turns small incidents into costly data breaches,” Volodymyr Kuznetsov, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cyberhaven, said in a statement. “With Cyberhaven, analysts no longer have to manually reconstruct data flows from bits and pieces of evidence in multiple tools to discern the root cause of a breach. Instead, Cyberhaven enables companies to detect and contain data loss, theft or misuse at machine speed.”

Image: Cyberhaven