When a technology heavyweight like Alphabet Inc. invests in a startup, it’s always worth paying extra attention to the announcement. The latest addition to its portfolio is Anomali Inc., which raised a total of $30 million from the search giant and three other institutional backers as part of a funding round that was publicized this morning.

The cash infusion comes four months after the security provider rebranded from its original name, ThreatStream, and introduced a set of new services to complement its flagship hacker tracking platform. Chief among them is Anomali Enterprise, an offering designed  to ease the analysis of the real-time malware and breach data that the outfit aggregates for its customers. The main way in which the software accomplishes the goal is by filtering out the information that isn’t necessarily required for an organization’s network protection efforts.

Retailers, for instance, can do without constant updates about the newest strands of malware targeting industrial manufacturing equipment. And a company that does need information about such threats might want to narrow down the intelligence stream to viruses that affect the specific kinds of hardware used in its factories. According to Anomali, removing unnecessary data reduces the workload both on security professionals and the threat detection software tasked with using the information to search for breaches in the corporate network.

The analysis can be performed either using Anomali Enterprise’s built-in threat detection capabilities or one of the several third party alternatives that the startup supports. The lineup includes Splunk Inc.’s popular log processing platform and Hadoop as well as traditional SIEM solutions like HPE’s ArcSight.

And to top it off, Anomali also has a freemium offering for small and midsize businesses that can’t afford to buy such sophisticated software. It’s a self-service application that lets administrators upload activity records from their network to the outfit’s infrastructure, where they’re checked against its threat intelligence feed to find malicious activity. The capital from today’s round will enable Anomali to broaden its value proposition even further and scale marketing efforts in conjunction.

Image via Mike Warner