ThreatStream nabs $22M to keep scouring the Net for threat intelligence

ThreatStream, which collects information about threats to help inform an organization’s security, announced today it has scored $22 million.

The new funding brings the company’s total raised to $26 million and is a vote of confidence in its approach, which CEO Hugh Njemanze described for VentureBeat as “curated intelligence about malicious actors.”

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The company’s Optic platform, available on-premises or as a cloud service, searches the Net for potential threats, tries to see how they might be related to each other, and then applies that information across an organization’s security infrastructure.

The selected intelligence from hundreds of sources, he said, is “combined with network activity event information to deliver much more timely, complete, and false positive-free detection of actionable security events.”

The recently hired Njemanze, who cofounded the ArcSight security firm and was an initial architect of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), has told news media that “the bad guys are winning because they are collaborating.”

The ThreatStream platform, he said, is helping to change the good guys’ behavior by making “threat intelligence sharing practical and culturally acceptable.”

He acknowledged to us that “there are many threat intelligence vendors who provide threat feeds, [but] ThreatStream is the first to prioritize threat intelligence into actionable operations leveraging the feedback of the community.”

Additionally, Njemanze said, his company’s platform is the only one that is vendor-agnostic, so organizations can still use their existing security infrastructure or can acquire best-of-breed security components.

This Series B round for the company, which was founded in February 2013, was led by General Catalyst Partners, along with Institutional Venture Partners and existing investors Google Ventures and Paladin Capital Group. The company said the funding will be used to hire new employees to support the growing customer base, plus it will be applied toward a new headquarters in Redwood City, Calif.