Announced in a press release today, the new investment round takes Vectra’s total funding to $123 million. Besides the Atlantic Bridge technology equity fund, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, Nissho Electronics Corp and several previous Vectra investors also participated in the latest round.
Vectra’s AI proactively detects anomalous network traffic before it has a chance to gain a foothold. The company is one of several providers that’s aiming to automate cybersecurity to improve accuracy and resilience. Security admins get warnings as soon as a problem is found, without having to spend time manually analysing server logs or records of network traffic.
The start-up already has over 400 enterprise customers, with 60 percent of them sharing data back to the company. This information is used to tune Vectra’s AI so it’s more capable of finding potential entrypoints and identifying emerging risks. Vectra told VentureBeat that customer data sharing helps the company’s AI to better protect all of its users by sharing insights through the cloud.
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Vectra will use the $36 million in new investment to expand its business and reach new enterprises. It currently employs over 140 people in various countries worldwide. The company will make additional hires to grow its expertise in artificial intelligence. The additional talent will help make Vectra’s AI more effective at pinpointing cyber threats in real-time.
“We have been impressed by the remarkable growth of Vectra in this fast-moving cybersecurity market,” said Kevin Dillon, managing partner of Atlantic Bridge. “The increasing volume, creativity and effectiveness of cyberattacks means that enterprises must adopt AI to automate cybersecurity operations. We look forward to helping the company expand its global enterprise footprint.” Vectra expects to add over 200 new people to its workforce across technical development, AI research and sales and marketing. The company intends to accelerate the growth of its platform and business to reach new enterprises across the world.
Vectra is competing with a growing roster of companies using AI to thwart cyberattacks, including major cloud providers such as IBM and Microsoft. The company is succeeding by focusing on “non-stop” automated hunting of threats, using behavioral models that find and isolate attackers before they’ve breached the frontline defences.
