Security took back the spotlight in the analytics world last week after Palantir Technologies Inc. raised another $450 million from investors in a round that brings its valuation to a reported $20 billion, an exceptional figure even in a time when Silicon Valley’s ten-figure club is at its biggest in recent memory. The capital will go straight into its namesake flagship data mining platform.

Palantir was one of the very first entrants into the analytics race and has taken advantage of its head-start to establish a strong foothold in the public sector, where its software is used extensively among members of the intelligence community to identify national security threats. Similar technology is being applied to finding cyber threats to private companies by Microsoft Corp. in the new network security service that it introduced against the backdrop of the funding.

The offering is a repackaged version of the threat detection technology that the company gained through its purchase of a startup called Aorato Ltd. earlier this year designed to complement on-premise Active Directory deployments. The software uses the historical activity patterns of employees as a reference to find unusual activity that may indicate a breach, such a sudden influx of cross-departmental data requests from an account without a history of regular collaboration.

Much like Palantir, the software traces its roots to the national security sector. The founders of Aorato gained their threat detection know-how in the Israel Defense Forces, the same place as the technical talent behind Leadspace Inc., which raised $18 million last week to harness data mining for an entirely different purpose: help companies better understand their customers.

Its service automatically aggregates information from social media and other channels to assemble a profile on a lead and assigns a score to that individual denoting on the chance of turning them into a paying customer. Most rivals only perform one or the other, which has enabled Leadspace to win over big-name customers such as Oracle Corp., Autodesk Inc. and more than 100 others, a list that the new capital is meant to help grow even further.

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