Application programming interface security startup Salt Security Inc. disclosed today that it has raised $70 million in new funding to expand its global operations across research and development, sales and marketing, and customer success.

The Series C round was led by Advent International and included Alkeon Capital, DFJ Growth, Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, S Capital VC and Y Combinator.

Founded in 2016, Salt Security provides an API protection platform designed to prevent attacks by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence. Pitched as offering a unique approach to API security, the company’s flagship Salt Security API Protection Platform provides an API analysis architecture that automates the continuous discovery of APIs and exposed sensitive data, stops API attackers during their reconnaissance activities and delivers remediation insights.

Salt Security’s API Protection Platform requires no agents, software changes or inline code, meaning that it can be deployed quickly with no impact on application performance.

As noted when the company raised $20 million in June, Salt Security’s machine learning models find security issues by analyzing usage data. The startup’s platform evaluates the routine, day-to-day requests made to an API and flags anomalous traffic that departs from normal activity patterns. In this way, Salt Security claims, it can catch a variety of threats and attempts by hackers to probe an API for weak points that could be used in future attacks.

Salt Security says it has seen strong growth and counts among its customers Equinix Inc., Finastra, TripActions Inc., Armis Inc. and DeinDeal AG.

“Several recent high-profile API security incidents have forced organizations to recognize that their existing protections cannot prevent API attacks or handle the scale and complexity of today’s API-driven applications,” Roey Eliyahu, co-founder and chief executive of Salt Security, said in a statement.“This new round of funding will help us increase our rate of innovation and businesses in more regions securely adopt APIs to foster their own innovation.”

Including the new funding, Salt Security has raised $131 million to date.

Image: Salt Security