Although they’re more cautious than they were a year or two ago, technology investors are still willing to bet big when an opportunity presents itself in a fast-growing space like cybersecurity. The latest example comes from Cylance Inc., an Irvine-based enterprise antivirus maker that today announced the completion of a $100 million funding round led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Insight Venture Partners.

The investment comes on the heels of the outfit marking a more than tenfold increase in billings and a 785 percent user-count gain since the launch of its namesake security software three years ago. Gartner Inc. recently named Cylance the fastest-growing endpoint protection provider of the past decade. Overall, over 1,000 organizations now use the firm’s antivirus, which owes its success to built-in machine learning algorithms that can supposedly detect even undiscovered malware strands.

Cylance is hardly the only security provider that offers such functionality, but its website claims that its software is more accurate and easier to manage than the competition. CylanceProtect can be deployed on endpoints in the form of a lightweight agent that doesn’t require regular updates like traditional antiviruses, or even so much as steady Internet access. Its detection algorithms come calibrated out-of-the-box to look for suspicious behavior that might indicate a file is malicious. When a positive match is found, the offending application is quickly quarantined and data about the incident is sent to a company’s backend security analytics system if a connection is available.

The functionality is designed mainly to prevent workers from downloading malware onto their desktops, but CylanceProtect also supports connected devices like industrial control systems and sensors. The antivirus provides the ability to enforce a so-called closed security policy for such hardware that automatically blocks changes not approved in advance. Moreover, the software also ensures that the handful of whitelisted applications with permission to run are not compromised by stopping potentially risky actions. Depending on the severity of the violation, its algorithms either block execution or shut down the offending process entirely.

The capital from today’s round will be used to expand CylanceProtection’s capabilities even further and step up marketing efforts in conjunction. Overall, the startup has raised $177 million from 9 investors since its founding in 2012. 

Image via Cylance