A mere seven months after announcing its first round, ProtectWise Inc. has received another $20 million from Tola Capital LLC and all four of its existing backers in a follow-up investment that tops off a historic financing streak for the enterprise security space. The new funds will help maintain its head start over all the other emerging players that are riding the wave of investor interest in new network protection technologies.

One of the latest beneficiaries of that trend is SentinelOne Inc., which raised $25 million last month to speed the development of its corporate antivirus. The machine learning algorithms built into the software determine if a particular application is malicious based a combination of its behavioral patterns and external threat intelligence, the same approach that ProtectWise has implemented in its cloud-based traffic monitoring service. Except instead of end-points, the startup focuses on securing the sensitive backend systems that hackers are interested in the most.

Its analytics technology can scan the activity logs coming off an organization’s on-premise networking equipment in near real-time for signs of foul play and check positive hits against data from other customers to weed out false positives. The distilled results are then presented to the security team as a neat list organized according to the severity of the threats, all while the service continues to ingest telemetry data in the background.  The aggregated metrics are permanently retained to allow for analysis of historical breaches that isn’t always possible when monitoring is performed behind the firewall.

The reason for that lies in the fact organizations typically discard traffic logs within a few weeks due to storage constraints, long before the average six months it takes to discover a breach. As a result, security teams often struggle to assess the damage caused by compromises and find all the backdoors the hackers may have left behind, a dual challenge that ProtectWise promises to address with one fell swoop. The new funding should help make its pitch even more attractive to CIOs struggling to adequately protect their sprawling networks.

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