Against the backdrop of the attack against Equifax Inc. that compromised over 140 million consumers, companies are investing heavily in cybersecurity to avoid becoming the next headline. Startups such as Threat Stack Inc. are rushing to meet the demand, with enthusiastic support from venture capitalists.

The five-year-old intrusion prevention provider today announced that it has closed a $45 million investment led by F-Prime Capital Partners and Eight Roads Ventures. Both funds are associated with financial giant Fidelity Investments, which manages over $2 trillion in assets.

The funding represents a big endorsement of Threat Stack’s value proposition. The startup offers a cloud-based platform that allows companies to centrally monitor their infrastructure, including both on-premises and in the cloud. A visual dashboard displays all the potential issues that Threat Stack’s algorithms consider a security risk.

At the network level, the platform looks for connections made from inside a company to malicious domains. The scanning is performed while a behavioral monitoring engine running in the background keeps an eye out for failed login attempts and other suspicious activity. According to Threat Stack, anomalies are ranked so that administrators can tackle the biggest risks first.

The platform also displays vulnerabilities that could lead to a breach in the future. Threat Stack says that its algorithms can flag systems and software with known security flaws, as well as configuration-related risks in a company’s cloud environment. This is equally important as the intrusion detection aspect given that a good portion of breaches are the result of unpatched software vulnerabilities, including among others the Equifax hack. 

Several high-profile tech companies rely on Threat Stack to protect their infrastructure.  Among them are OneLogic Inc., Jive Software Inc. and MuleSoft Inc., which went public in March. This demand has helped the startup cap off the second quarter with a 235 percent year-over-year revenue jump and a significantly expanded workforce.

Threat Stack plans to grow its headcount by 30 percent this year using the new funding. The round is the latest affirmation of the venture capital’s interest in the cybersecurity market, which shows no signs of abating. The past few months alone have seen several network protection startups close nine-figure investments, one of the biggest Illumio Inc.’s $125 million round in June.

Image: Threat Stack