Prelert Raises $7.5 Million in Venture Capital

Prelert, an anomaly detection company, has raised a $7.5 million round of venture capital financing from Intel Capital and existing investors, Fairhaven Capital and Sierra Ventures.

This investment will enable Prelert to further expand its field sales and engineering organizations to leverage the growing interest in Anomaly Detective® from enterprises, cloud service providers, and IT management providers.

As IT security and operations professionals struggle to find actionable insight within the overwhelming volume of machine-generated big data that their systems create, Prelert offers a solution to easily find operational threats, issues and opportunities as they are occurring. Using unsupervised machine learning technology, Prelert’s Anomaly Detective processes huge volumes of streaming data to learn what normal behavior looks like within an IT environment, and in real time, flags anomalous activity.

“Enterprise IT environments are simply becoming too big and complex for humans to manage,” said Jason Waxman, vice president of Cloud Platforms Group at Intel in a press release. “Traditional methods of IT security and operations management are quickly becoming ineffective because of the amount of data being created, and the industry needs solutions to this challenge that democratize data science.

The Anomaly Detective engine empowers companies to easily identify opportunities and threats within their data, and we’re excited to help further development and usage of this unique and important technology through our investment.”

Traditional approaches to IT security and performance management have not scaled to provide actionable insight as the volume of data that modern IT environments create has grown to as much as terabytes per hour. Because they require human defined rules that can never cover every contingency, thousands of false alerts are generated every day, which often mask important notifications. The volume of data generated requires time-consuming and costly data mining technology, or a team of data scientists to find critical information within this data. Prelert turns this approach on its head by cutting through the noise and automatically identifying security threats and performance issues, enabling companies to improve the security and service levels of their IT systems while reducing overall costs.

“We’ve seen far too many instances where major corporations find out too late that cybercriminals have had free reign on their networks for weeks or even months,” said Mark Jaffe, Prelert’s CEO in a press release. “These increasingly sophisticated hackers know how to sneak around tripwires set by most security teams but can not avoid leaving fingerprints in the form of anomalous behaviors. The volume and complexity of the data that must be analyzed to find those fingerprints require an automated solution to ferret out malicious activity.

Prelert is a first mover in providing the type of meaningful big machine data analytics that operations and security executives have been searching for.”