Many of today’s cybersecurity startups are using technologies such as artificial intelligence to help companies automate how they handle threats and reduce the need for manual input from operations staff. Arctic Wolf Networks Inc., in contrast, has made human intuition a key part of its value proposition.

The Sunnyvale, California-based threat detection provider today announced the completion of a $16 million funding round led by Sonae Investment Management. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Knollwood Investment Advisory chipped in as well.

Arctic Wolf offers what it describes as a cloud-based “security operations center” designed to ease threat detection for companies. The core component is a homegrown detection platform that can analyze data from an organization’s infrastructure to identify potential problems. The results are sent not to the customer, but rather to Arctic Wolf’s internal team of security engineers.

The startup investigates anomalies on behalf of clients to determine if there is reason for concern. Arctic Wolf said its engineers dig into the data to uncover potential signs of a breach, as well as vulnerable systems that may leave an organization exposed to attack.

When a problem is identified, the details are displayed on a customer-facing dashboard so that a company’s administrators may take action. Arctic Wolf said the human expertise paired with its platform saves internal network protection teams the trouble of manually sifting through raw security logs for breach indicators. That can free them up to focus on other tasks and potentially reduce the chance of something slipping through the cracks.

There are several other providers with a similar value proposition. One of them is Proficio Inc., which raised a new round of funding in mid-December to drive interest around its rival security operations center.

Despite the competition, Arctic Wolf claimed to have grown revenue fourfold over the past year. The startup will invest the new capital in further boosting customer acquisition and product development efforts.  

Image: Arctic Wolf