Arista Networks Inc. today said that it has entered into an agreement to buy Awake Security Inc., a network threat detection startup backed by nearly $80 million in funding.

The acquisition price was not disclosed. Awake likely isn’t selling for lack of financial runway: It raised its latest funding round, a $30 million Series B investment, less than five months ago from a consortium that included Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.

At the time, the startup said it had increased recurring revenues nearly 700% over the preceding year. That would suggest Arista may be paying a sizable premium over the roughly $80 million in funding Aware raised prior the deal. 

Publicly traded Arista makes network equipment and management software for enterprises. Awake has developed a software platform that uses artificial intelligence to find threats inside the corporate network. 

The company says its platform is capable of catching not only malware but also other kinds threats that don’t employ malicious code. According to Awake, its technology can detect, among others, phishing emails and attempts by hackers to use stolen employee credentials to internal systems. The platform looks for threats by deploying software sensors the corporate network that scan data traffic to find suspicious activity.

Under the hood, Awake relies on a brand of AI known as federated learning. AI-powered security tools normally analyze network activity by sending data to a cloud backend for processing. Awake’s federated learning approach, in contrast, allows its platform to perform the analysis on customers’ own infrastructure, which provides more privacy because sensitive network activity data doesn’t have to leave the four walls of the organization.

The deal will bolster Arista’s cybersecurity capabilities. In a blog post, Arista Chief Executive Officer Jayshree Ullal detailed that the plan is to integrate the threat detection monitoring technology from Awake with the existing network monitoring features the company offers as part of its products. 

“We wanted to offer a solution that solved real problems, yet respected our ecosystem of existing partnerships” with cybersecurity providers, Ullal wrote in the post. “Networking is at the cusp of an epic transformation in security with proactive detection and response embedded in the network.”

Arista has built out a “cognitive management plane that automates, integrates and orchestrates tasks,” Awake CEO Rahul Kashyap wrote in a separate blog post. “This parallels Awake’s vision for the future of security operations.” 

At an industry level, the concept of automated network threat detection powered by AI fits well into the broader push toward automation among the major networking suppliers. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s Aruba unit and Juniper Networks Inc., two of Arista’s biggest rivals, have each introduced AI solutions for automating network troubleshooting recently. Arista’s purchase of Awake may be a sign that security troubleshooting could become a bigger part of the story over time.

Photo: Awake Security