Despite fierce competition in the antivirus market, SentinelOne Inc. sees a bright future for its artificial intelligence-powered threat detection platform. Now, it appears several top Silicon Valley venture funds agree.

SentinelOne revealed this morning that it’s closed a mammoth $70 million funding round led by Redpoint Ventures. The firm, which counts itself among the startup’s customers, was joined by Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and about a half-dozen of the backers who participated in its earlier funding rounds.

SentinelOne will use the new capital to scale customer acquisition efforts with the stated aim of reaching fivefold year-over-year sales growth in 2017 with its antivirus platform. Described as following a “fundamentally new approach to endpoint protection,” the startup’s platform promises to provide companies with all the tools they need to keep hackers at bay. It’s comprised of two components: A lightweight agent that runs locally on each node and a backend analytics engine that handles the computational heavy lifting.

To take advantage of SentinelOne’s platform, a company needs to install an agent on every system it’s looking to protect. The startup says its software is compatible with both employee devices and servers. Once everything is properly set up, the modules start transmitting activity data from the hardware on which they’re running to the analytics engine, which examines the information for threats using machine learning algorithms.

The evaluation relies on a database of malware behavior patterns and attack methods maintained by a dedicated research team at SentinelOne. When a positive match is found, the startup’s platform can automatically suspend or remove offending applications based on the severity of the threat. It also can identify files that have been modified by the malware and quickly undo the changes.

On a deployment-wide level, the platform performs what SentinelOne refers to as immunization. It logs the details of new threats when they’re detected for the first time and updates all the agents in a company’s environment to prevent repeat infections. The system thus removes the need for administrators to perform the task manually, saving a considerable amount of time in the process, while reducing the risk of human error.

SentinelOne has attracted more than $110 million in funding to date from 12 investors.

Image courtesy of SentinelOne