Awake Security Nabs Over $30M from Greylock and Bain Capital Ventures

7/17/17

Awake Security today announced that it raised more than $30 Million from Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures to deliver security teams the deep visibility and answers they need to detect, investigate and hunt for threats that are missed today. The company also announced that Asheem Chandna, partner at Greylock Partners, and Enrique Salem, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures joined the board of directors.

Awake was established by a multidisciplinary team comprised of early employees who helped build widely-used, category-defining products at companies like ArcSight (HP), CipherCloud, Cylance, FireEye, Foundstone (McAfee), IntruVert (McAfee), Netwitness (RSA), Nicira (VMware) and PolyServe (HP). Given this experience, the team not only has firsthand understanding of the shortcomings of existing security analytics solutions, but also the potential of new networking, machine learning and data science technologies to overcome those limitations.

“Today’s SOC is in trouble: the work is grueling, repetitive and tedious – yet high stakes and high pressure, all of which leads to analyst burnout and lost tribal knowledge,” said Michael Callahan, co-founder and CEO, Awake Security. “To address this, we’re taking a fundamentally different approach, automating the information gathering and interpretation that top experts perform, allowing any analyst to answer questions easily that are difficult or impossible to answer today. These advanced analytics free them from alert-focused drudgery and enable teams to do what they do best: investigate and hunt for threats.”

Awake today also announced the general availability of its advanced security analytics solution, built on the foundation of more than two years of research with hundreds of security professionals and threat investigators from Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises. Awake applies machine learning and data science to automate the painstaking analysis expert investigators perform and thus improves security team productivity ten-fold. This enables them to detect, investigate and hunt for attacks that are often missed today, such as corporate espionage, insider threats, lateral movement and data exfiltration.

“Organizations are at a disadvantage in the arms race with today’s cyber attackers. There is a dramatic shortage of security expertise, and many of today’s security products aren’t optimized to both surface threats and more efficiently tackle them,” said Enrique Salem, managing director of Bain Capital Ventures and former CEO of Symantec. “Having spent a career working in cybersecurity, it’s clear that Awake’s ability to make security professionals more effective in protecting organizations against today’s threats will have a lasting impact.”

Awake’s patent-pending Security Knowledge Graph™ data model enables analysts to ask new and powerful questions posed in a simple human-friendly vocabulary of entities, their attributes, relationships, behaviors and activities, rather than IP addresses and sessions. Only Awake’s analytics predict these questions and keep answers ready in a workflow-driven user interface, while prioritizing and grouping entities that stand out. This allows analysts to focus the investigation on an entity profile and hunt for behaviors, rather than just indicators.

“We’re excited to partner with Awake, in their mission to deliver new industry-leading capabilities for security analysts,” said Asheem Chandna of Greylock Partners. “We see a growing interest and a large market opportunity across enterprise customers. The Awake platform and technology is demonstrating strong, previously unavailable insights at initial customer deployments, with new levels of visibility, automation and analysis.”

About Awake Security

Awake Security provides the only advanced security analytics solution that delivers deep visibility and answers to questions that cannot even be asked today, improving productivity ten-fold. The company’s patent-pending Security Knowledge Graph™ data model uses machine learning and data science to automate painstaking analyses expert investigators perform. It identifies and tracks network entities as humans think of them and highlights entity attributes, relationships, behaviors and activities. This enables analysts to proactively detect, hunt, investigate and respond to threats. Awake is built on a foundation of more than two years of research with hundreds of security professionals and more than a dozen security teams. The company is backed by Greylock Partners and Bain Capital Ventures and is based in Mountain View, CA.

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