Cybersecurity startup Cybereason Inc. has raised $50 million from Google LLC’s cloud business in an extension to a $275 million Series F funding round it first announced earlier this year.

The new investment, detailed today, is notable because it’s fairly rare for Google’s cloud business to invest in startups directly. However, parent company Alphabet Inc. does join funding rounds on a regular basis through its GV and CapitalG investment arms. Alphabet has backed multiple startups in the cybersecurity market, including SecurityScorecard Inc., which achieved a nearly $1 billion valuation earlier this year.

Cybereason provides a software platform that can find malware in a company’s cloud environment, on employee devices and other systems. The platform spots breaches using a threat detection engine that analyzes thousands of technical details about each file it scans. The engine uses the extracted information to estimate the probability of a file containing malware and, if the probability exceeds a certain threshold, Cybereason deems it malicious.

Cybereason determines which files contain malware and which don’t with the help of about 10 petabytes’ worth of cybersecurity data it processes every week for customers. The data contains useful details on hacker tactics and new threats that help the startup keep its malware detection algorithms up to date.

The technology has caught the attention of Google, which inked a partnership with Cybereason shortly before today’s announcement of the $50 million investment. The search giant and Cybereason have teamed up to integrate the startup’s platform with Google Cloud’s Chronicle service. Chronicle helps enterprises gain a better understanding of hacking attempts targeting their systems.

After a breach occurs, administrators analyze the incident to understand how hackers gained access to the network and what can be done to block similar cyberattacks in the future. The task is difficult because it requires analyzing large amounts of data from the systems that were compromised.

Chronicle promises to address some of the key challenges that make investigating cyberattacks complicated. One common issue is that administrators sometimes have access to only partial data about a breach because storage infrastructure limitations require companies to delete most of the information.

Query completion times are another challenge. The queries that administrators run to investigate a breach can take a long time to complete because of the underlying data’s complexity and volume, which reduces productivity. 

Chronicle can ingest petabytes of data, which removes the storage constraints that sometimes require organizations to discard a portion of their cybersecurity information. Moreover, Google Cloud says that the service can return query results in a few seconds. 

At least a portion of the $50 million investment Google Cloud has made in Cybereason will likely go toward advancing the companies’ partnership. The startup already has plenty of capital to support other growth initiatives thanks to a $275 million round that it announced in July. Overall, Cybereason has raised more than $700 million in funding to date.

The startup said after closing its July funding round that it was planning to double its headcount over the next 12 months. In the longer term, Cybereason intends to go public.

The enterprise technology market’s leading platform players regularly invest in companies with products that can complement their own offerings. Microsoft Corp., one of Google Cloud’s top rivals, invested in data protection startup Rubrik Inc. a few months ago at a valuation reported to be about $4 billion.

Image: Cybereason