Barely a week seems to go by nowadays without at least one startup raising funding to take on the industry’s established breach prevention providers. Today, the spotlight is on E8 Security Inc., an emerging threat analysis specalist that announced it has closed a $12 million round led by Strategic Cyber Ventures LLC.

The Washington, D.C.-based fund was launched earlier this year by veterans of Trend Micro Inc., Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and US-CERT, the federal agency responsible for combating online threats, to support promising security startups. E8 caught the executives’ attention thanks to its mathematical approach to improving network protection. The firm’s namesake breach detection system employs graph analysis, machine learning algorithms and other modern pattern recognition methods to find vulnerabilities that usually slip by traditional tools.

Once it finds an infected endpoint or a user who behaves suspiciously, the E8 Security Behavioral Intelligence Platform compares the anomaly against the rest of the network to see if there’s more than meets the eye. The startup says its algorithms can uncover everything from a threat’s propagation path to the number of devices it affects. And the company says the platform is also able to determine whether a set of seemingly isolated infections are in fact part of a coordinated attack campaign that requires closer attention from a company’s IT department.

From there, E8 displays the discovered threat in the order of their severity to help network protection professionals prioritize their work. The startup says that a built-in security analysis console provides the ability to drill down into every anomaly and look for patterns that its platform’s automated algorithms make have missed. The insights that are produced as part of the process can then be fed to a company’s primary breach prevention system to improve detection accuracu. Moreover, they’re also used by the E8 Security Behavioral Intelligence Platform itself to optimize how threats are prioritized based on users’ work patterns.

Today’s investment should enable the startup to broaden the software’s capabilities even further. E8 will need to work hard if it wants to stand out from the numerous other security vendors out there that are harnessing data science to combat hacking. Switzerland’s Nexthink SA, for instance, uses machine learning algorithms to detect malicious user activity in real-time. The firm closed a $40 million funding round of its own earlier this year to step up its competitive efforts.

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