The rapid increase in the number of attacks against corporate networks is creating a lot of new business for security startups like Nexthink SA, which snagged $40 million from investors today to try and increase its momentum even further. The capital will be used to open a sales office in Boston tasked with marketing the Swiss firm’s namesake endpoint protection software to North American organizations.

Nexthink already has more than 600 customers using the platform to secure some 2.4 million corporate- and employee-owned devices. The startup uses a special logger installed in each endpoint to pull activity metrics into its analytics backend, where the information is merged with operational records from an organization’s core applications to produce a complete picture of user activity. From there, the combined dataset is run through a set of homegrown machine learning algorithms to find signs of malicious behavior. The outfit says that the entire process happens in real-time. which enables administrators to identify and tackle threats as soon as they emerge.

Nexthink also provides the ability to examine historical activity data using a built-in dashboarding tool for visualizing network usage trends. A report can incorporate information both from the startup’s system and any external data sources that an organization may be interested in tapping, including internal logging tools and third party threat intelligence feeds. The startup says that the functionality can be useful not only for security professionals  but also executives looking to gain a better understanding of how effectively their organizations are combating malware.

Yet while its value proposition is appealing, Nexthink can expect tough competition in the North American market. There are countless other security startups in the U.S. that have likewise incorporated machine learning technology into their offerings, and many of them are venture-backed. But only a few can boast of having raised more than the $73.9 million that the Swiss outfit secured to date, a war chest that should come handy as it ramps up its stateside operations. Xconomy reports that 110 workers will be hired to man the new Boston sales office over the next 18 months.

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