Awake Security, Cybersecurity Startup, Launches With $31M

Awake Security announced news on Monday (July 17) that it has closed more than $30 million in funding from venture capital (VC) firms Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures and the general availability of its advanced security analytics solution.

In a press release, the company said its patent-pending Security Knowledge Graph data model uses machine learning and data science to embody the expertise of the world’s foremost investigators in a broad-based analytics solution.

In early customer deployments with Fortune 500 cybersecurity teams, Awake Security has improved productivity tenfold, allowing teams to detect, investigate and hunt for threats that were previously missed, the company said in the release. By cutting out cumbersome tasks during the investigative process, the tech startup enables analysts to focus on high-value cybersecurity work, speeding the detection of insider threats, corporate espionage, lateral movement and data exfiltration.

By capturing the knowledge and conclusions a security team develops while doing its work, Awake lets teams get better and more effective every day; facilitates collaboration, training and evaluation and makes security work more rewarding, the company said.

“Security tools today generate massive amounts of alerts and data but have utterly failed to account for how useful or contextual that data is to security teams. As a result, analysts have to manually connect the dots to hunt for threats, an exhausting process for even the most experienced investigator,” said Gary Golomb, Awake’s co-founder, in the press release. “Awake is unleashing a new model for security operations by letting analysts explore devices instead of IP addresses, people instead of packets, data instead of protocols and activities instead of sessions. This empowers the analyst to target and stop the threats that truly matter.”

The tech startup noted its security services were developed based on research with hundreds of security professionals and more than a dozen Fortune 500 and Global 2000 SOCs.