Signal Sciences Inc., a startup that helps companies such as Adobe Systems Inc. protect their online services against hackers, has raised $35 million in funding to wrest market share from incumbent rivals.

The round, announced today, was led by Lead Edge Capital. The New York-based venture capital firm is most notable for its past investments in Uber Technologies Inc. and Spotify Technology SA. It has also backed Duo Security Inc., a major provider of authentication services and Signal Sciences customer that Cisco Systems Inc. acquired last year for $2.35 billion.

Signal Sciences offers a web application firewall or WAF for blocking malicious traffic to online services. The startup’s platform promises to avoid some of the complexities involved in using competing products, particularly during the initial deployment phase.

One challenge stems from the fact that WAF products often require companies to modify their applications, which can be tricky because of the large number of components in a typical web service. Signal Sciences claims that its platform doesn’t require any major changes and takes less than an hour to set up. It also spares administrators the trouble of having to manually define policies for how traffic should be filtered, which frees up yet more time.

Instead of manually defined policies, the platform determines what requests to block based on threat data aggregated by Signal Sciences’ analytics backend. The startup collects information on attack patterns from the applications in its installed base and external sources such as vulnerability databases. New findings, for instance IP addresses flagged as malicious by a third-party threat intelligence provider, are transmitted to customers’ deployments every 30 seconds.

Signal Sciences claims its WAF can fend off wide range of online threats. The platform provides protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks, attempts to take over users’ accounts, bots seeking to exploit potential application vulnerabilities and other common types of attacks.

Signal Sciences currently processes 250 billion online requests per week for over 10,000 applications. The startup claims to have reached this point after tripling its customer count and revenue over each of the past two years, which makes it one of the fastest-growing companies in the WAF market. Other players include Barracuda Networks Inc., Citrix Systems Inc. and Cloudflare Inc. 

Investors have injected more than $61 million into Signal Sciences to date.

Photo: Signal Sciences