Cybersecurity startup Oligo Security Ltd. today announced that it has closed a $50 million funding round led by Greenfield Partners.

Red Dot Capital Partners, Strait Capital and several returning backers chipped in as well. The Series B investment brings Oligo’s total outside funding to $80 million.

Tel Aviv-based Oligo provides a platform that helps enterprises monitor their applications for cybersecurity issues. According to the company, its software finds vulnerabilities by mapping out each application’s code components and then scanning those components for anomalies. It does so using a technology called eBPF.

The operating system on which an application runs plays a key role in practically every action that the program performs. As a result, the operating system has extensive visibility into application activity. This visibility is useful for spotting hacking attempts and vulnerable code.

Linux, the operating system on which most enterprise applications run, can be turned into a cybersecurity monitoring tool using a built-in feature called eBPF. The feature makes it possible to add custom code for detecting malicious activity to the kernel. The kernel is the part of Linux that contains its most important components, including those it uses to interact with the underlying hardware.

Oligo’s platform uses an eBPF-based sensor to collect cybersecurity data about applications. According to the company, its sensor can be installed in a few minutes and consumes under 1% of the processing capacity allocated to a workload. Up to thousands of sensors can run in large application environments.

Oligo detects when an application activates a feature that contains vulnerable code. The company’s platform spots vulnerable code even when it’s packaged into a library, a software module written by a third party rather than an enterprise’s in-house developers. Oligo can, for example, detect if a library runs a type of file that it was not designed to process, which is often a sign of malicious activity. 

The third-party modules on which an application depends to work sometimes themselves depend on external components. Those external components are known as transitive dependencies. According to Oligo, its eBPF sensors can detect and block cybersecurity issues that affect such dependencies.

The company says its platform not only finds malicious code but also spots when hackers attempt to exploit it. The software detects cyberattacks by monitoring for unusual activity patterns in applications. 

Oligo’s platform has been adopted by multiple Fortune 500 companies since launching two years ago. To grow its customer base, the company will invest the funding round announced today in go-to-market initiatives. 

Photo of Oligo’s founders: Oligo