Most of the funding that is flowing into the security market nowadays goes to early stage startups, but the investment community is also willing to bet on more established players when an opportunity presents itself. The latest example is Bay Dynamics Inc., a 15-year-old breach prevention provider that today secured $23 million in financing from Carrick Capital Partners LLC and Comcast Corp.’s venture capital arm.

The vendor will use the cash to fuel international expansion efforts and hire more developers to work on its flagship Risk Fabric platform, which employs machine learning technology to find security threats. Its algorithms can individually check every server and endpoint on a company’s network for vulnerabilities like misconfigured access controls that may be exploited by hackers. Meanwhile, a traffic scanning component tracks the activity on those devices in the background to find potential signs of unauthorized behavior. Bay Dynamics says that the combination of the two provides security administrators with a “complete picture” of their infrastructure.

In practice, that means the software can identify both the security flaws involved in a breach and the hackers’ modus operandi. One area where this approach works particularly well is combatting attacks that employ stolen user credentials. Risk Fabric enables companies to quickly detect when a privileged account is being used to download large amounts of sensitive data or displays some other abnormal behavior that might indicate foul play. Afterwards, administrators can use the diagnostic information provided by the platform to take measures for ensuring the incident doesn’t repeat itself in the future.

Risk Fabric attempts to set itself apart from the numerous alternatives that hit the market in recent years by providing a number of value-added features on top of its core detection functionality. Chief among them is an extensive set of reporting capabilities designed to let IT departments update higher-ups on their security posture, user activity and attack trends. Today’s funding should make it easier for Bay Dynamics maintain its edge amid the growing competition from new startup rivals.

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