Vectra lands $100M Series E investment for AI-driven network security

Vectra, a seven-year-old company that helps customers detect intrusions at the network level, whether in the cloud or on premises, announced a $100 million Series E funding round today led by TCV. Existing investors, including Khosla Ventures and Accel, also participated in the round, which brings the total raised to more than $200 million, according to the company.

As company CEO Hitesh Sheth explained, there are two primary types of intrusion detection. The first is end point detection and the second is his company’s area of coverage, network detection and response, or NDR.  He says that by adding a layer of artificial intelligence, it improves the overall results.

“One of the keys to our success has been applying AI to network traffic, the networking side of NDR, to look for the signal in the noise. And we can do this across the entire infrastructure, from the data center to the cloud all the way into end user traffic including IoT,” he explained.

He said that as companies move their data to the cloud, they are looking for ways to ensure the security of their most valuable data assets, and he says his company’s NDR solution can provide that. In fact, securing the cloud side of the equation is one of the primary investment focuses for this round.

Tim McAdam, from lead investor TCV, says that the AI piece is a real differentiator for Vectra and one that attracted his firm to invest in the company. He said that while he realized that AI is an overused term these days, after talking to 30 customers he heard over and over again that Vectra’s AI-driven solution was a differentiator over competing products. “All of them have decided to standardize on the Vectra Cognito because to a person, they spoke of the efficacy and the reduction of their threat vectors as a result of standardizing on Vectra,” McAdam told TechCrunch.

The company was founded in 2012 and currently has 240 employees. That is expected to double in a year to 18 months with this funding.